


The beating of my heart is a drum and it's lost and it's looking for a rhythm like you

by moonriverdrifter



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Blood Play (mild), Demisexual Hilda, Dubious Consent, F/F, F/M, Fighting As Foreplay, First Time, Hilda and Zelda are both a fucking mess, Kink, Loss of Virginity, Magical restraints, Regretting Sex, Self-Harm, Sex, Sexual Trauma and its Aftermath, Sibling Incest, They're also both fucking the wrong people, This is angsty as shit, pain play
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2019-09-06 16:43:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 22,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16836526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonriverdrifter/pseuds/moonriverdrifter
Summary: You can take the darkness at the pit of the nightAnd turn into a beacon burning endlessly brightI've gotta follow it 'cause everything I knowWell, it's nothing 'til I give it to you.Hilda and Zelda making love out of nothing at all.





	1. Are you still mine?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New Spellman Sisters incest fic, who dis?
> 
> Title and lyrics in description from "Making Love Out of Nothing At All" by Air Supply

“Unchained Melody” emanates from Cerberus’s record player the first time he and Hilda make love. It’s not Hilda’s favorite tune. The 50’s weren’t her favorite decade for music, really, but Cerberus likes it, and Hilda’s so used to holding in her grievances that she simply doesn’t complain, doesn’t tell him that The Righteous Brothers aren’t exactly her idea of mood music.

Zelda likes this song. She loved the music back then, the smooth voices, the mellow guitar and the soft, slow cadences. Hilda is more partial to the hippie rock that supplanted this style, but the 50’s were fine, too. A good decade, that had been.

Somewhere around the time that Ambrose came to live with them, circa 1947, Hilda and Zelda made a pact of sorts, that they would try to get along, attempt not to fight, or at least not so much. It was a fragile alliance born out of practicality more than anything. For one, Ambrose was having a hard enough time as it was; they mutually agreed that he didn’t need their constant rowing added into the mix. Also, that had been a big decade for Edward; he’d been rising through the ranks of the clergy quickly then, and his work left him without either the time or the patience to mediate his sisters’ arguments.

“Honestly, you two; you’re both grown women! Why must you act like you’re still in the nursery?” Edward had demanded one evening, exasperated after coming home from the Academy to such complete pandemonium that he actually had to magically separate them. Hilda had been held against one living room wall, her fist full of ripped-out strawberry blonde strands, while Zelda was stuck to the other, a steak knife still pointed in Hilda’s direction. Edward looked from one errant sister to the other, and finally declared, “This ends today.” He didn’t release them until they’d agreed to play nicely, as it were.

And they had, for a bit. It didn’t last, obviously, but they got a good ten years or so out of that agreement. Hilda had been happiest then, lackluster music not withstanding, and she thought that Zelda had, too.

“Hils?” Cerberus’s voice calls her back, to a present in which his lips are at her throat, his hand beneath her dress. “You still with me?”

There’s concern in his eyes, bless him, and Hilda’s heart melts just the slightest bit.

“Yes.” She smiles, raises herself up to kiss him, “Yes, I’m right here. Don’t stop.”

He doesn’t. Cerberus touches her, and Hilda groans and sighs, and it’s like it’s supposed to be, like it is in her novels. She does not hesitate when he takes off her panties, answers in the affirmative when he asks if this is what she wants. It’s what she’s wanted for a century, at least, and she doesn’t know why she didn’t do it sooner. 

She can’t tell him that, though. He doesn’t know how old she really is, nor does he know that she’s never done this before. She’s not been able to figure out how to tell him, and now he’s on top of her and it’s too late.

Hilda feels the weight of Cerberus’s body, the heat between them, and she holds her breath. This will hurt, she knows. Zelda told her once, in one of the rare moments when they were on good enough terms to talk like sisters, that this is a lie and really it’s not all that bad. But Hilda has always heard that it hurts, and she’s not as tough as Zelda. She expects pain, and she’s not disappointed, but she knows it will get better. In her novels, it always gets better.

She waits for the earth to shift, for fireworks or shooting stars. Any cliché will do, really. But there’s none of that. There’s only pressure and sweat and musk, and time going by so slowly yet doing so much (are you still mine?), Cerberus’s grunts and her moans, because she does feel something. The pleasure is so faint that it takes her a moment to find it, but it is there, muted and almost in the background of everything else. Mostly, though, Hilda moans because she is supposed to.

She doesn’t know if it’s over too soon, or not quickly enough. Hilda has, as her niece would say, a lot of feelings right now, most of them at complete odds with one another. But she lets Cerberus pull her into his arms, rests her head on his chest, contemplates the peeling wallpaper at the far corner of his bedroom, just above the dresser. He strokes her hair, the golden locks that she magically extended specifically because she thought her hair would look pretty mussed and fanned out over his pillows. Maybe it does; she has no way of knowing. There are no mirrors in here, and even if there were, she’s not sure she’d want to look at herself.

Hilda lets Cerberus hold her for a while, lets him kiss the top of her head and whisper nonsense in her ear. She even answers him, once or twice, says whatever it is she thinks she’s meant to say. Eventually, though, the clock on his bedside table reads 12:14am, and she’s rising from the bed, covers pressed tight to her naked chest, fishing around on the floor for her leopard-print dress and her underwear.

“You don’t have to go,” he says, rolling over to face her.

“Yes, I do,” she replies, “My family will be expecting me home.”

“Oh, come on, baby. Stay here with me.”

No one has called her “baby” in at least a century and a half. Her father used to call her that, because she was the youngest, the smallest, the one who best loved climbing up in his lap and spending hours there. She does not like the endearment coming from Cerberus’s lips.

“I’m not ready for my family to know about _this_ yet,” she says, unable to hide her frustration, “Which they will, if I waltz in the door in the morning, wearing the same clothes I left in.”

His dark eyes cloud over, handsome features twist with hurt, and Hilda frowns. She didn’t mean to be unkind, hates that she came off that way.

“It’s not you,” she says. She falls back onto the bed, kisses his cheek, then his mouth, “It’s…I have to think of just the right way to tell my niece. And my sister…”

“I know,” Cerberus replies. He presses their lips together again, and then lets her leave, watching her retreating form mournfully.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The house is dark as Hilda comes up the drive, dead silent when she enters the front door. Some nights she returns and Ambrose’s light is still on, but she’s later than usual, and everything is like pitch. When she first started working, and after she and Cerberus went on their first official date, Zelda used to wait up, smoking in the kitchen. She would always make some excuse about the baby keeping her awake, even when the little thing was nowhere in sight, even when there was a pot of tea on the stove. But Zelda’s mostly stopped that now, lost her appetite for tormenting and trying to goad Hilda into a fight, she supposes, at least with regard to this particular thing.

Hilda hangs her coat on the rack, locks the door behind her. Her feet are heavy on the stairs. The hallway leading to her room, all the way at the end, seems longer than it ever has before. She pauses outside Zelda’s door, the one that used to be hers as well, hand perched over the knob. When she turns it, she expects to be hit with some kind of nasty repelling spell from a startled Zelda, probably taking her for some kind of home invader.

There’s nothing, though. There is only moonlight through the window, Zelda washed in it, still and beautiful against her pillows, the baby asleep in her bassinet at the end of the bed. Hilda’s eyes scan the room, stop when she sees her sister’s cigarette case on the bedside table, along with her holder and a book of matches.

Silently, swiftly, Hilda tiptoes across the room, slips a cigarette from the case, waits for Zelda to wake up and ask her what in Satan’s name she’s doing, to hurl some kind of snide comment about her sneaking around like a teenager in the middle of the night. She hopes to Satan that Zelda won’t rouse, because, Hilda realizes, she will know right away what’s happened, just like Hilda always does when it’s Zelda in this position. She doesn’t know what Zelda will say, what she’ll do, but it won’t be pleasant.

But Zelda, luckily, sleeps like a corpse. Hilda could do parkour off the walls and Zelda probably wouldn’t stir. Hilda palms the cigarette and the matchbook, too, closes the door behind her without a sound, creeps back through the hall and down the stairs. She goes to the kitchen, her haven, sits down at the table and lights up. The last time she smoked was at Woodstock.

The smoke is unpleasant in her throat, but she doesn’t cough or choke, just lets it burn before blowing out through her nose. Hilda shivers, wonders why nobody has turned on the bloody heater, resolves to do that before she goes to bed. She’s said it before and she’ll say it again; literally everyone in this house would have died decades ago were she not there to make sure they ate their vegetables and brushed their teeth and took a sweater along when they went out.

Hilda’s fingers and nose are cold. She wants a shower. There is a mess between her legs and she decides that she no longer likes this dress as much as she did before, and “Unchained Melody” is stuck in her head now. She’ll never be able to hear it again without thinking about tonight.

She looks over to the island that she uses as her unofficial canning station, recalls peaceful 1950’s afternoons. Zelda would help her back then, sometimes, would make jams and preserves with her. They used to listen to the radio while they worked; they would sing along. Sometimes they danced. She remembers that they were making apple jelly the first time they heard Elvis. It was “Heartbreak Hotel,” and they did an ungraceful swing dance together while Ambrose laughed from the breakfast table. Hilda does not know why the memory makes tears spill down her cheeks, but she lets them flow, unchecked.

She sits and cries, sits and thinks, doesn’t know what is wrong with her. She thought she would be happy, possibly proud. She chews her lower lip bloody in between puffs on the cigarette, and when it’s disintegrated down to the filter she rises and puts it under the tap, throws the butt in the bin. She thinks she should bring the matchbook back to Zelda’s room, but she doesn’t want to face her sister, even unconscious, so she just leaves it on the counter. In the morning Zelda will wonder how it got there, will notice that one of her cigarettes is missing, will accuse Ambrose or Sabrina before she even suspects Hilda.

Hilda should feel bad about that, but can’t find it in her to care. She takes one last, long look at the kitchen, still thinking of better days, before she turns the lights out and heads for the bathroom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My incredibly depressing take on the dress from the teaser, because I don't want Hilda to be happy with anyone but Zelda.


	2. You better find somebody to love

Zelda wakes to the wash of rain at the window and the baby’s gurgling. For once the child didn’t keep her up all night; they were both like bricks beneath their blankets. Zelda wishes that the extra rest had made her feel better, but nothing ever does, these days.

She's an automaton as she rises from bed, mixes a bottle, lifts the little one from her bassinet and sits down with her. The coffee smell from downstairs is wafting through the house, and Zelda briefly contemplates summoning Vinegar Tom, sending him downstairs to get Hilda to run her a cup. She won’t do it, though. Hilda would acquiesce cheerfully if not happily, but Zelda can’t bring herself to ask.

The last time she asked for help, Hilda just turned away and said that she was moving rooms. Zelda glances at the baby girl’s face, her little mouth working feverishly on the bottle, and sighs. It's not that she doesn't love the child. She does, but it's not like the way she loved Ambrose, and then Sabrina, when they were both small. The way she had loved Hilda, too, once upon a time when she was helpless and had no choice but to let Zelda hold and sing to her for hours and hours. Before she found her own feet and began the slow but certain process of getting as far away as ungodly possible.

The baby finishes her meal, spits out the nipple, and Zelda burps her, then lays her back in the bassinet. If Zelda lets her go back to sleep, she’ll be awake all night, will drive her batty, but she hasn’t the appetite for playing at motherhood right now. She begins to consider that Hilda may be right, that the child isn’t safe here, that they’re all too tangled up with the High Priest, that she really must find another situation for his daughter. 

The strains of Jefferson Airplane reach Zelda’s ears as she leaves her room. It’s not unusual for Hilda to play music as she cooks, nor is it unusual for the songs to remind her of times gone by. Zelda’s nearing two hundred, after all; she’s left a lot of yesteryears in her dust. This morning, though, it hits her wrong, like recollections of Woodstock always do, because she doesn’t suppose either she or Hilda were sober for more than a few minutes at a time. She’s unsure what her sister remembers, but Zelda can only recall things in snatches. 

Mud and drugs and bodies swaying, the mortal man and the cannabis smell in the back of his van while he pounded her into the upholstery. And Hilda, her hair long back then, her hand warm in Zelda’s, body close as they danced, sang along: “Don’t you want somebody to love?” They spent most of the peace and love years renewing the feud that neither of them could even remember starting, but at Woodstock they were like sisters again and all was right, if only for a while.

The music and the nostalgia are almost too much, and beneath it all there is something else, something wrong in the house. Zelda can feel it as she descends the stairs. Her unease grows the closer she gets to the kitchen, promised land of coffee and memory and Hilda. The younger witch’s back is to her; she’s intent on whatever she’s got on the stove, and Ambrose and Sabrina are sporting at the table, throwing jokes and little bits of toast at each other, like it’s any other day, like they’re not witches at all and can’t pick up on the most basic of energy changes.

Zelda herself can’t fully assimilate it, though. She pours a cup of coffee, takes a black, bitter sip, then another, begins to feel like herself again. Hilda’s left her newspaper on the counter, like always, and Zelda frowns when she sees that this morning’s delivery is in Mandarin. She does read Mandarin, but not as keenly as she once did, certainly not as well as she’d supposed she could when she started subscribing to the paper in the first place, so it will be slow going today. She’s about to turn toward the table when she sees her matchbook next to the sink.

“What’s this doing here?” she asks, picks it up, addresses the room in general, but Ambrose especially, because he’s always stealing her cigarettes, is notorious for it, in fact. He professes ignorance, and Zelda has no reason not to believe him. Usually he knows when he’s been caught out and apologizes sheepishly. When she turns to Sabrina, the girl is indignant at being accused. 

“You know I don’t smoke, Aunt Zee. Gross.” Zelda remembers when Sabrina was seven and learned about the dangers of tobacco at school. She went on a crusade to get Zelda to quit, destroyed three separate packs of cigarettes before Hilda sat her down and explained that their Dark Lord blessed them with unsullied health, that things fatal to mortals had no effect on them.

So Zelda sighs, thinks that she must be losing her mind, because it’s been decades since she’s seen Hilda so much as think about smoking. She never liked cigarettes much anyway, save for a brief flapper phase in ’27, but that went almost as quickly as it came.

She takes her seat at the head of the table without apologizing to either her niece or nephew, begins reading her paper, cannot concentrate because of the blasted song. 

“Oy!” says Hilda, when Zelda turns off the radio with a snap of her fingers. Zelda, as always, has a retort ready, is about to spit it out when her sister turns around, and time stops and all of the color leaks out of the world and Zelda’s ill, suddenly, so ill as pinpricks of crimson bloom behind her eyes.

She knows now; it comes all in a rush, and why did she not realize sooner? It’s so obvious what has happened, and it hits her right in the gut, and she’s disgusted with everything, with Ambrose and Sabrina for not seeing it, with Hilda for letting herself be defiled. With herself, for not being able to stop it. She’s the eldest, she’s the responsible one; she should have better control over her own family, enough to keep her sister from running around with some…some _mortal_ , from embarrassing all of them this way.

“Auntie?” Sabrina is reaching over, putting her hand on Zelda’s. “Auntie, are you all right?”

Zelda scarcely notices the girl. All she can see is her sister, Hilda changed, Hilda defiant and without even the decency to be ashamed of herself. Zelda narrows her eyes, cannot see straight, cannot think straight. She stands up, unaware that her chair clatters to the floor in her wake, leaves the room because she can’t be where Hilda is.

Ambrose and Sabrina gape as she flees, but Hilda’s gaze remains steady on Zelda’s back, her lips pursed, eyes knowing.

\-------------------------------------------------------

Hilda is on high alert as she finishes up the breakfast dishes, long after both Ambrose and Sabrina have gone for the Academy. She doesn’t have to do the washing by hand; there’s a spell for everything, but she’s always loved the tickle of the faucet water on her skin, the scent of the soap, the simple alchemy of transforming dirty to clean. She needs that feeling this morning, as she struggles to process the semi-unpleasant ache between her legs, the tired throbbing in her brain, the bone-deep weariness that has nothing to do with how little she’s slept.

She dries the last dish, places it on the rack, wipes her hands on the cloth and turns, just in time to stop Zelda’s descending arm in its tracks. Her sister struggles hard against the hex, but Hilda holds on, reminds Zelda that she’s not the only one in this family with powers. Zelda’s arm tingles, loses feeling, and the ice pick in her hand falls harmlessly to the floor. Hilda dashes it away before Zelda can dive for it again, almost catches her sister’s blow, aimed right at her face. Her open hand does not meet its target, though; Hilda stops it, has Zelda captive now. But she’s forgotten her sister’s most dangerous weapon.

“You…slut…” Zelda grounds out, “You are a disgrace to this family. Do you have no self-respect whatsoever?”

The urge to cower is strong. There are apologies bubbling to Hilda’s lips, pleas and pacifying words threatening to spill forth. She realized a long time ago that she will never be able to make Zelda proud of her, any more than she can calm her sister’s raging temper. She gave up trying eventually, gave up hoping, but still demurred in order to keep the peace, because somebody had to. Hilda could put up with threats and jibes and fucking axes and hammers to her face as long as she was safe on the moral high ground.

Now, though. Zelda’s words hurt her, because it’s nothing she hasn’t already said to herself, over and over again, all night long. Hilda asks herself the question Mama and Papa and even Edward asked, way back when, the one that Zelda has been asking, in alternating snide tones and concerned whispers, forever. She wonders, not for the first time, what is really wrong with her. It is, after all, only sex, and for Satan’s sake, she and Zelda were raised in the same damn house, so how did Hilda turn out so screwed up, and why can she not just _do this_ like a normal person?

Her inner turmoil makes her defensive, leads her to take a step forward, Zelda’s hands still trapped in the snares of her magic. There are tears in her eyes as she stares her sister down, and her lips tremble, but only fractionally, as she replies, “I did nothing that you haven’t done a hundred times over, Zelda.”

And of course Zelda is quick with a comeback, and of course she’s bemoaning the fact that it was a _mortal_ , and _how could you, Hilda_?

“Don’t act like you haven’t slept with mortals, Zelda!”

“For fun!” Zelda fires back, “Once or twice in a blue moon. I don’t have relationships with them! I don’t carry on with them, parade my tawdry little dalliances with them in front of the whole town! Think of the family, Hilda!”

“Sod the family, Zelda!” Hilda can’t remember the last time she yelled like this, high-pitched, raw and so very _angry_. 

It frightens her, scares Zelda, too. The older witch’s blue, blue eyes go wide and she shudders, because Hilda’s clearly come unhinged and she still has her fixed to the spot. And this gratifies Hilda; she likes Zelda bewildered, Zelda terrified, likes that she’s the reason for it. It’s thrilling and foreign, and Hilda doesn’t understand these feelings any more than Zelda understands her actions, and they’re in this space together, mutually puzzled and afraid, before finally Hilda lets her go. Zelda tries to catch her, grab her arm, but Hilda slips past her, and she’s gone.

Zelda walks to the table on legs that will barely support her weight, stays there a long time. She vacillates between thinking and fuming, but mostly she’s still seeing red, because Hilda hadn’t changed in more than a century. With the world going mad all around them, Hilda has always been the only thing Zelda could rely on, and now she’s lost that, too, and what else is left?

She gets up from the table, paces for a few moments, reaches for her cigarettes and matchbox. It takes her three tries to get one lit, and the smoke is not an adequate distraction. She’s still quivering, and she’s crying—when the hell did that happen?—and thoughts come like thunderclaps, rumbling through her brain and then disappearing. Zelda’s walks the length of the kitchen, and her hands close over a butcher knife, take up a heavy rolling pin, find the ice pick again, so many deadly things, things that she has used on Hilda before, wouldn’t hesitate to kill with now, and none of it matters.

Hilda will never let Zelda murder her again, never let her even within maiming distance, and this is the thought that undoes her. 

She lets out a howl before rushing upon the cabinet where her sister stores all of her lovingly-crafted jellies and jams, her lemon curd and homemade ketchup. Zelda seeks catharsis as the first jar smashes against the wall, does not find it, breaks another and still nothing. She’s gone through half the cabinet before she feels even remotely sane enough to make her way back to her own bedroom, to get on with the business of caring for the baby while trying to put herself together, and before she goes, she reaches down to the floor, picks up a rough glass shard and takes it with her, just in case.


	3. I think it's gonna hurt me for a long, long time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey again guys! Sorry it's been so long. Somehow while I was doing my holiday travels I got a pinched nerve in my shoulder, which has made sitting at a computer absolute hell. Soooooo I had to type all this up on my phone, which takes 10000x longer and makes editing an absolute bitch. But Spellman Sisters angst is worth it, and so are you all <3
> 
> Oh also, trigger warning: this chapter deals heavily with self-harm and its aftermath.

Zelda knows exactly where to find Faustus, just as she knows that he will be waiting. She goes through the motions of weighing baby Judas, listening to his little heart, makes a production of cooing over him, tittering with the nanny about what a perfect specimen of babyhood he is. Leticia is prettier, and seeing her brother makes Zelda's heart almost cleave in two. She misses having the little girl in her arms, thinks it unjust that a man who would have killed his own daughter should get to languish in baby bliss while she had to sacrifice. But now is not the time for tears; it will look suspicious if she breaks down.

After she leaves the nursery, the ritual begins, the path unfolds just as it did the first time, and with every one of the baby's checkups since. She navigates the tangle of hallways that she sometimes traces in her nightmares, when it is not Faustus waiting for her at the end but Hilda. When Zelda dreams, it is her sister ravaging her lips, biting her skin, lifting her skirt and bending her forward to drive in so hard and deep it knocks the breath from her lungs. Zelda hates those midnight visions for a myriad of reasons. 

Because they have teased and tormented her for centuries, details always shifting, changing with time, but always they are wrong, wrong, wrong and she well knows it, is ashamed each time she wakes up red and moaning and clenching. Because Hilda is not Hilda in the dreams; she's all sharp edges and detachment and she says the most degrading things, words that are probably true but would break Zelda if she actually heard them from the real Hilda's mouth. Mostly, though, she hates the dreams because she would take even that cruel, far-away version of her sister, would take her inside eagerly and consider herself blessed.

Instead she gets Faustus Blackwood. Zelda has surprised even herself with how she's grown to revile the man. She didn't think, months ago in front of the fireplace, failed to remember that there were a host of very good reasons she stopped sleeping with him before, her dignity not the least of them. All she understood in that desperate hour was that it had been forever since she got laid and she was so very lonely and everything was breaking apart. It had been easy enough, then, to ride out all her frustration on the High Priest's cock. For a while, it was even fun. 

But Zelda is beyond weary of it. She does not know why she still goes to him, why she doesn't just leave him waiting, alone in his study unfinished, unsatisfied. It's habit by now, she supposes, or possibly the same compulsion that makes her pick up the whip or the shard from Hilda's jam jar, makes her step into the scalding bath and let it scorch her until she can't suppress the sobs. Letting Faustus pound and bite and scratch hurts better than all that; the pain goes deeper than skin. It's the most efficient form of punishment.

He is waiting at his desk, as he always is, stripped down to his trousers and button-down shirt. He's got the radio on, and that's odd, because Faustus was one of the last in the coven to adopt mortal technology. Everyone else had absolutely flipped over the phonograph, the telephone, 8 tracks and computers. Some even praised mortal ingenuity; there was talk of how they were finally catching up. But Faustus proclaimed it all heresy; he hadn't even gotten a phone until the very late 90s, and then only because his wife insisted.

And so it seems wrong to walk in on him listening to Linda Ronstadt, the song that Hilda and Ambrose had both loved back in 1970, would dance to on nice days. Ambrose used to spontaneously take hold of his youngest aunt's waist and twirl her around the kitchen or the parlor while he hummed the melody and she sang: "I think I'm gonna love you for a long, long time." And Zelda just sat at the table, rolling her eyes behind a newspaper but peeking out, every now and then, to watch Hilda's skirt lift as Ambrose spun her.

Zelda thinks about commenting on the music, possibly asking Faustus to just turn it off, but he asks how his son is doing, and she is distracted. She fills him in on the results of her exam--Judas is perfectly healthy--and they exchange a few entendre-laden pleasantries before his mouth covers hers. Zelda is getting to be a good actress; she's certain he can't tell how much she loathes him, this, everything.

Or perhaps he can and simply doesn't care. Zelda knows she means nothing to him, can't even imagine why he hasn't grown bored with her yet. As far as she knows, their on-and-off affair is the longest he's had, and she wonders why he keeps coming back. It isn't love, surely.

The first time they fucked was immediately after Edward was named High Priest. Zelda felt Faustus's rage, his hatred of her brother, felt it with each thrust and did not care because she had wanted Faustus Blackwood since she was too young to have him. It was only afterwards that it occurred to her to feel degraded. That was more than thirty years ago, and not much has changed, besides the fact that, now, neither of them have even finished yet and Zelda already hates herself.

She hates the way she groans, pushes back against him, hates her hands clutching his desk as he moves behind her. Zelda despises the cuts on her pale arms that Faustus isn't attentive enough to notice, the welts hidden beneath her dress, which Faustus causes to sing agony with each press of his body to hers. She wishes that it ached more, that she could inflict enough pain on herself so she wouldn't need the High Priest. But he's hurting her so exquisitely; of course he's better at it than Zelda could ever be. The radio helps, too, Linda Ronstadt's voice and the dripping sorrow of the lyrics and the way that it makes her picture Hilda, gliding around the kitchen, singing along, billowing skirts, flushed cheeks and wide grin.

Zelda comes hard, and even the orgasm is misery, because Faustus's teeth are sunk into her shoulder, his too-long nails tearing her side to ribbons, and Hilda's still in her head, Hilda as she used to be and will never be again. Hilda, all that Zelda wants, even after everything.

Faustus follows Zelda after only one more thrust, pulls out quickly, efficiently, and then his pants are back up, Zelda's skirt is straightened, hair put back into place, and she only has to endure a few minutes of small talk before she's free to leave. She does not cry until she's safely out of his house, into the hearse, and well on her way back to her empty home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song for this chapter is Linda Ronstadt's "Long, Long Time."


	4. But not all the prayers in the world could save us

Hilda gets used to living for the afterglow. It becomes routine, Cee molding his angles to the swells of her after he comes, all sweat and skin and warmth. It feels good, making him feel good. She thinks this must be love, and that makes it easier.

After they've begun, Cee wants her almost every time they are alone. She wants to want him, _that way_. She will want him, isn't quite there yet, and that's fine. Hilda will learn to like sex, and in the meantime, she likes _him_ and that's enough.

She dislikes the feel of him in her hand, though, and also that makes a mess, and he sees her disgust the first time, apologizes. Rolls over when she insists she's good for tonight, thanks. And he never asks for _that_ again. Praise Satan.

Taking him in her mouth quickly becomes her activity of choice. She doesn't like it, the feel, the taste, any of it. But Cee comes quickest this way, and then he holds her, nose at the crown of her hair, lips at her ear. These are the bits Hilda likes, and a few minutes' discomfort is a modest price for it. Compromise; this is what a relationship is, and it's fine, until it isn't.

Hilda initiates this time. It's unusual, but it's been more than a week and she catches him staring at her arse more than a few times as she sweeps, refills napkin holders, stocks condiments. She wants him, too, wants what comes after. 

So Hilda locks up, meets him in the storeroom. When she twines her arms about his waist, he is warm through the polyester of his cape. Warm but not willing. His back is rigid, and it's like she's not there.

"What's wrong, love?" 

She moves, and they're face-to-face, and for half a second Hilda is afraid. She's asked that exact question before, many times, and it always ends with her reeking of grave-rot. But this is not Zelda. Cee could not be more different from her sister, in looks or temperament. For the first time, Hilda wonders if this is why she liked him, at the start.

He does not speak, and it has Hilda sweating beneath her costume. Her heart thrums harder, faster during each second he does not fill with an explanation. Finally, he stops it entirely.

"I don't want to do this anymore, Hils." 

His gaze is tormented, and Hilda's instinct is to soothe. That is what she does; she comforts, but Cee pulls back when her hand advances. She is stricken, and she realizes that she hates this, the delicacy of his voice when he asks her to please, just don't. As if she could ever hurt him as much as he's hurting her. Hilda resents his melancholia, the tear that slowly traces one sharp cheekbone. Hilda thought that she wanted softness, doesn't know what to do with it now it's right in front of her.

She thinks that Zelda may have been onto something, killing her all these years. Every time Hilda rebirths herself, after she's shambled to the house, rinsed away the gore and the filth, things go back to normal. Disagreements are forgotten, order is restored. Hilda returns to scrambling eggs in the morning, canning in the afternoon. Zelda sits reading and pontificating like always. Sometimes, after an especially lengthy resurrection, Zelda even finds her in the bath, helps her scrub the mud from her hair, and her sister's hands at her scalp feel good, warm, safe.

Cee feels this way, too, when he is naked and sated and inclined to cling. And Hilda cannot lose that, wants to fight for it, but when she speaks, she sounds as pathetic as he looks.

"Why?" she asks.

"Because this doesn't feel right. Hasn't for a while."

Hilda replies that she does not understand. She does, but wants to hear him say it. If he's going to do this, he may as well wound her properly. She will make him tell her all that is wrong with her, every reason she isn't good enough. She's pudgy, she isn't pretty enough, her personality, her _being_ is too much. Her enthusiasm is too effusive, her smiles too bright, her affection cloying. Hilda does not--cannot--love halfway. She'd thought Cee understood that, liked it, maybe loved her for it. But of course, who could?

"I...it's just...it feels like you're never really with me," he says, "When we make love, it's always like you're somewhere else. I need someone who can be present. I need a connection we don't seem to have."

Oh. _Of course_. Hilda should have known that she would be disappointing, sexually, should have tried harder to please. She thinks that maybe if she tells him, that it's only him, has only ever been him. He'll understand, and she will promise him practice, lots of delicious practice, and improvement, and then he'll...

"I can't keep doing this. You're not happy, and I can feel it when we're together."

"Why do you think I'm not happy? I'm happy, Cee." It's not entirely a lie. Whenever they're not in bed, Hilda is perfectly content.

"Are you, Hilda? Are you happy with me? Really?"

He's so sincere, and they're both so raw, and he's cracked her open so much that Hilda can't lie to him, or to herself, anymore.

"No." She doesn't want to admit it, but those deep-mourning eyes drag it from her. She's crying, and she's sorry, so sorry, can't stop repeating it.

Cee knows; he presses her to him, just once for the road, tries to reassure her. They are still friends, of course (she knows that's impossible). She still has a job (no longer wants it; she can't exist here anymore, not after this). 

Hilda offers to work through the rest of her schedule, stick around until he's found a replacement. She is assured that there's no need. This is just as painful for Cee, and he would rather make it a clean break, and Hilda is almost grateful.

She wants to weep as she walks through his door for the last time, but she doesn't. Zelda would be proud, at least, though Hilda doubts very much that she will ever tell her.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

She wakes to Zelda's voice, thinks she is surely dreaming. She and her sister have traded no words in weeks, barely even bothered to stare each other down over meals. There's something careful about the way Zelda says her name, and it occurs to Hilda that she should be ashamed of herself, radiating her grief, hurting so palpably that even Zelda can feel it in her soul of bitterness and cigarette smoke.

Zelda's fist is frenzied on her door now, and Hilda sees why when she glances at the clock. It's long past her normal wake-up hour, long past breakfast time, and in fifty years she has never not made the morning meal. Hilda imagines they are desperate downstairs, Zelda and Ambrose and Sabrina. She ignores her sister's knocking, burrows deeper into her bed, slips away.

She comes to and it is noon. The house is silent, most of its occupants departed. Only Zelda is about, somewhere, not close. Hilda would feel her close; that's her curse. She always feels Zelda.

She slides from bed, wants to slide off the edge of the world. At once she remembers that she was supposed to work tonight, is lost then. What did she do before she worked, before Cee? She's no clue.

Hilda puts a record on her antique phonograph, drops the needle down, fills the room with Fleetwood Mac. She cannot abide the silence; never could. She even hums as she stitches up corpses. She remembers that this album was a Solstice gift back in 1979, from Zelda, of all people, because "I know how much you enjoy this mortal noise." 

Once, on an afternoon when rain had spoiled Zelda's plans to go out for a (not at all) secret rendezvous with a lover, Hilda had insisted on playing "Storms" for her sister. They'd lain on the floor together, the same way they used to pour over toys or picture books as little girls. Zelda closed her eyes, and the sisters were so near one another, and the rain and the guitar and Zelda's heartbeat coalesced into what Hilda thought love sounded like. And she expected a huff when she spoke, or to be mocked or left alone, but couldn't help but tease, "You see, sister, not all modern music is 'mortal noise.'" Zelda rolled her eyes, but when she got up, it wasn't to abandon Hilda but to start the song over.

Hilda does the same now, and as she rises from her bed she catches movement outside her window, looks and sees Zelda, busy out in the pet cemetery. Odd. Hilda can feel all familiars present and accounted for. She watches Zelda swing the shovel, feels Salem outside her door, no doubt posted by a worried Sabrina, hears Stevie Nicks singing her heartache. Experiences emotions she cannot describe, has never needed the words for. 

Outside, the sun is eclipsed by deep gray. One moment the sky is pure and bright as Hilda used to be, and the next it's storming. Zelda is drenched before she's even cognizant of the rain, looks to the sky, genuinely confused for the first time in a long while. Hilda would giggle, if there were any laughter left in her.

And then Zelda spots her at the window, narrows her eyes, because of course she'll blame the weather and the subsequent destruction of her dry-clean-only dress on Hilda. Everything is Hilda's fault, and she's more aware of it than she's ever been.

She leaves her sister's sight, tucks herself back into the covers, listens to the same song over and over again. She hopes Zelda can hear it, hopes it drives her mad, stokes her rage. Hilda waits and waits, anticipating her sister's sloshing steps in the hall, the shovel thrusting down, caving in her skull. But it never comes, and eventually Hilda gives up, falls asleep with cheeks damp and prickling. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zelda's not doing anything shady in the pet cemetery; I just needed an excuse to get her outside.


	5. I never never want to go home because I haven't got one anymore

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Dubious consent. Basically a boss-taking-advantage-of-a-subordinate situation.

When Zelda comes downstairs to begin her labored efforts at making a palatable breakfast, she finds Ambrose already at the table. He has made coffee, and that’s probably for the best. Last time Zelda tried, she was finding grounds in the gaps between counters for days, and had to make a special trip into Greendale to replace their old coffee maker after hexing it into a smoking mess.

She never was very domestic, and her only comfort now comes from knowing that she is, at least, not the most incompetent cook in the house. Ambrose behaves as though he didn’t grow up baking pies and casseroles right alongside Hilda, and Sabrina is still traumatized from Mother’s Day two years ago, when her efforts at making her aunts breakfast in bed ended with a call to the fire department. Zelda grumbles her way through preparing each dinner, claims to be overjoyed that breakfasts can be taken on the go and lunch can be sandwich meat slapped onto bread. She would sooner burn in the pit for three hundred years than admit that she luxuriates in the feeling of being needed.

“What’s this?” Zelda asks, frowning at the letter Ambrose holds out to her. That frown becomes an outright scowl when she recognizes Faustus’s handwriting.

“Don’t know. I just went out to retrieve your newspapers and found it on top of the pile,” replies Ambrose, shrugging.

Zelda opens the envelope, holds the letter away from her face like something venomous. She scans the even precision of the cursive just enough to get the gist, and at once she is sick to her stomach.

“It seems the High Priest would like me to return to the Academy to direct the Satanic Choir. On a full-time basis.”

Ambrose notes that she does not sound as thrilled about this as she could, but brushes it off. Nothing has been right in this house since Aunt Hilda quit her job (or was fired; she still won’t come out of her room and explain exactly what happened). He supposes Auntie Zee is simply feeling the strain.

“Well,” he says, as enthusiastically as he can manage so early in the morning, “That’s wonderful.”

Zelda only hums vague assent, plugs in the toaster, begins shoving in slices of bread.

Her heart goes a mile a minute and still cannot keep pace with her racing thoughts. _Why this, why me, why now?_

Her last venture into choir directing was an unmitigated disaster. Well, no, that's not entirely true. Things had been going quite well, really, until her lesson got interrupted by a mostly-dead witch vomiting up dirt from her family’s own graveyard. Which, in all fairness, was not Zelda’s fault, but she’d taken responsibility for it, like she did any time one of her relatives stepped out of line, and she never dreamed Faustus would ask her back, not after _that_.

Dear Satan, why could he not just hire some tarty, barely-one-hundred-year-old thing who might actually throb with excitement at getting to work so closely with the High Priest? Then he could have a choir director _and_ a new fuck toy, and Zelda could be left in peace, to tend the mortuary and the small army of helpless charges that now includes her once perfectly functional—if barely adequate—sister.

Zelda reminds herself that she can always say no, resolves to write back doing exactly that after breakfast. But bread is toasted, eggs are fried, and Sabrina and Ambrose have long since departed, and she finds herself at her writing desk, paralyzed. She uncaps her fountain pen, can’t make her hand form the words. She doesn’t know why, does not care to psychoanalyze herself. She writes out a short but affirmative reply, tells herself that she’s doing this for the family, because despite her and Ambrose’s best efforts, they still have yet to recover from the shame of Hilda’s excommunication, Hilda's incredibly public slumming with a mortal, Sabrina’s continuing waywardness.

She has almost accepted that she can do nothing about Hilda, almost given up entirely. _But at least if I’m at the Academy all day, I can keep an eye on Sabrina and make sure she doesn’t imperil us any further_ , Zelda muses as she sends the letter off. It’s such a convincing smokescreen that she nearly has herself fooled.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

No one is more surprised by her general sense of job satisfaction than Zelda herself. She supposes she shouldn’t be shocked that she is a passable teacher. She did, after all, handle Ambrose’s early education, and she taught Sabrina, too, ABCs and 1-2-3s and basic spellcasting, before Hilda insisted she be sent off to public school, to “get socialized” and “stay in touch with her mortal nature.” Zelda is still bitter at losing that particular battle, not just because she believes Sabrina’s mortal nature would be best eradicated, but also because she feels that she was robbed of the chance to nurture her niece in the only way she could have.

Her job as choir director is no substitute for those lost years, but it does satisfy her. She genuinely enjoys instructing her pupils, seeing their collective labors come to fruition. And Zelda would be lying if she said she didn’t glean a sense of perverse joy from making the children sing the Spellman family’s favorite mortal songs right alongside the traditional hymns and other devotional compositions. Currently she is using her planning period to figure out how she can spin “Uptown Girl” to convince her students it’s about the Dark Lord.

Zelda is still slightly in awe of how surreal it seems, that she should have been the one selected to fill this position. She herself has never been much of a singer; her voice is technically good, if uninspired. Of course, she began studying music early; Mama had insisted, sat Zelda and her siblings down and explained that it’s important for witches to be competent singers, at the very least. Some spells must be chanted in rhythm, and some lower-level demons can only be called through song. And, besides that, nobody likes the person at Black Mass who sings the hymns out of tune.

Edward was that person, Zelda remembers. Her brother emphatically could not sing; he even had to hire a cantor during the time he served as High Priest. It was his only failing, the family’s only clue that he was not, in fact, divine. Zelda had reveled in it during their childhood lessons. She liked being the best, even if Edward outshone her in every other endeavor.

Then Hilda ruined it all, as was her wont. Mama called her voice “a gift from the Dark Lord himself.” Zelda told herself it was good Hilda could sing, since she had so little else going for her. But nastiness didn’t ease the sting of fading into the background, not only at home lessons but also at Black Mass, after which Papa would introduce Hilda to people as “my little songbird.” And each Sunday, Hilda came inside from playing after church to find a new one of her toys broken, and it gratified Zelda to see her weeping, hear her beg: “Why, Zelda, why? Just tell me what I’ve done!”

She asked the same question on her first weekend home from the Academy, after coming through the door excited to tell Mama and Papa and Edward that she’d been personally selected to join the Satanic Choir. It pleased Zelda greatly that her sister had never figured out why she got the ice pick through her eye, that first time which was to set the course for the rest of their lives together.

Hilda also never realized that Zelda used to stand outside the washroom door, listening to her crooning hymns in the bath. When Sabrina was a baby, Zelda scolded Hilda for singing 80’s ballads to her instead of proper witches’ cradle songs, was secretly relieved when Hilda was forced to carry on because Foreigner was the only thing that got their niece to sleep. To this day, she still grins when Hilda hums Bob Dylan while cooking, but only when she is safely at the table and obscured by a newspaper.

Of the two of them, Hilda would have been most suited to this job. But Hilda is going on week two of leaving her room only for the toilet or a shower. Zelda burns when she considers it, because her sister has always been a sentimental idiot, but she never was so needlessly melodramatic. Certainly she never left Zelda to handle the house, the cooking, the childrearing and the mortuary all by herself.

Zelda has, over the course of Hilda’s self-imposed confinement, cultivated a healthy crop of annoyance and resentment. She’s allowed these to fester into outright anger, because that is convenient, because it’s easy. It gives her an excuse not to reflect on how unlike herself Hilda is really behaving, how there is clearly something wrong and Zelda is powerless to do anything about it because, even if Hilda were to open her door, Zelda wouldn’t know what to say.

The most she can do is offer to curse the ridiculous bookstore vampire man until his genitals wither and fall away. She would be happy to do it, but has no idea if it would be warranted, because no one knows what has actually happened. And even if the man does deserve a good hexing, she doesn’t know if Hilda would even want that, because, while that has always been Zelda's method for dispatching ex-lovers, Hilda is not her.

And Zelda knows nothing of this particular brand of pain, anyway. She has never been hurt by love because she is not capable of letting anyone within striking distance of her heart. She will admit to caring for exactly four other people in this world. Three are flesh of her own flesh and therefore, that love is mandatory. The other is hidden away in Moon Valley, best not thought of except on sleepless early mornings when the lines between emotion and exhaustion are at their blurriest.

Working helps, and Zelda is grateful for this job inasmuch as it takes her mind off of the things she cannot control and puts her in a position of unquestioned authority. There are, of course, still many things to dislike about teaching at the Academy. Sabrina is displeased, for one, accuses her aunt of “hovering over her” and goes out of her way to avoid Zelda at school. _Teenagers_. Zelda is continually reminded of how irritating they can be, especially _en masse_.

But managing entire rooms saturated with hormones and angst is nothing to dealing with Faustus. When he showed up at her office on her first day, during her planning period, Zelda's suspicion that she had not been hired just for the benefit of the choir was confirmed. And every subsequent time, she has contemplated sending him away, telling him that she is far too busy for what she knows he wants. Then, inevitably, she remembers why she is doing this in the first place, her duty to her family.

She thinks, further, of how she cannot go back to spending every day locked away in her house, with Hilda both there and not, an unseen hand dropping the needle on maudlin records. The stillness of home, the shadows and the strains of Leonard Cohen have all begun working in tandem to drive Zelda slowly round the bend, and letting Faustus do what he wants with her is worth it if it means she can remain at this job that grants her a reprieve from all that.

Zelda replays all these thoughts at the sound of the familiar knock. She banishes her Billy Joel sheet music to a desk drawer and, as she does, the edge of the paper brushes something hard, which upon further inspection reveals itself to be the shard from Hilda’s jam jar. Zelda does not remember when she began carrying it with her, or why, but she doesn’t like to be without it now, never knows when she’ll need it, though she hasn’t used it in ages. Why would she, when she’s got Faustus? That is another dubious perk of this job; the cuts on her arms and thighs are finally getting a chance to heal, leaving only the faintest scars in their wake as Zelda surrenders to an even more effective form of punishment.

And she needs it today, she decides, remembering that morning, Hilda’s closed door. The plate of eggs and toast she deposited outside of it, the (habitual, by now) way she knocked even though she no longer expects her sister to open up. She had been greeted by "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out," was reminded of Ambrose’s goth phase (it had been hard on the entire family), and there had not been an eye-roll powerful enough to convey how incredibly frustrated she was getting with Hilda’s theatrics. Now, thinking back over the morning’s events, she feels contrition for slamming her fist into the wood and yelling, “Fine; stay in there and rot!”

That spark of regret, and the accompanying suspicion that she probably made things worse for Hilda, probably ensured that she would remain in her room for Satan only knew how much longer now, compel Zelda to answer Faustus’s call. When he is rougher than usual, fists her hair so hard she actually squeals, and raises welts on her ass with his palm, Zelda is gratified. And after he leaves, when she is shuddering in her chair and struggling to stem the flow of tears (she cannot be red and puffy-eyed for her next class), she tells herself that she deserves it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song for this chapter = "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" by The Smiths. Next chapter, exciting things will happen, and the sisters will (finally) begin making a go of mending what's fucked up between them (in a not-entirely-healthy-or-normal way, because these are the Spellmans).


	6. I wanna hurt you just to hear you screaming my name

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a longer one for you kids :)
> 
> Also, I apologize in advance for the gratuitous POV switching.

Hilda can’t place the exact moment when her bedroom becomes too small, too hot, simultaneously too much and not enough. But one day, she wakes up to find that her lavender potpourri no longer covers the heady perfume of two-week-old laundry and the odors of every breakfast, lunch, and dinner she’s eaten alone at her writing desk. All of her records have been played and replayed at least thrice, and still she feels like barely half a person. Hilda doesn’t know what she thought the solitude and sad songs and hours of unbroken tedium would do for her, but she feels much the same as she did on the day that she oozed home from the bookstore and locked herself away.

She’s still miserable, supposes that this is simply her new state of being. Can’t be helped, but Hilda decides that if she is to continue on this way, she may as well give her depression room to expand, let it gambol about the foyer, stretch out on the parlor settee. Feed it something that wasn’t prepared by inexpert hands and then left on a plate in the hallway.

She misses Sabrina’s face, Ambrose’s, too. Zelda’s, less so, because missing her is a constant in Hilda’s life. Even when they shared a bed in the nursery, Hilda missed her sister, the kindly Zelda who sang to her and plaited her hair, made apple jelly at her side and danced to Elvis. That Zelda has always been evanescent, mostly confined to Hilda’s better dreams and only sometimes appearing in the flesh. Hilda accepted long ago that it would always be her lot, to hold her breath and wait for the return of that version of her sister, to savor the fleeting moments when she showed her face and alternately fear and resent Zelda the rest of the time.

Hilda longs for Nice Zelda, for Sabrina and Ambrose, but she is not ready to face them, not yet. So she lies in bed, listens for the sounds that she never paid attention to until she’d removed herself from the world that created them. Ambrose’s light tread on the stairs, Sabrina’s voice raised, Zelda’s raised higher, arguing about whatever new thing their niece wants to do that she should not be getting into.

Hilda feels guilty, because she should be in the thick of it, taking a side. Explaining to Sabrina—more patiently than Zelda can—why she should not do the thing, or trying to convince her sister that the thing is really not all that bad and Sabrina should just be allowed to carry on with it. Idly, Hilda tries to make sense of the shouting, to determine whose side she would be on this morning. She’s never particularly enjoyed agreeing with Zelda, but can see, now, how she’s been a bit too lax with Sabrina. Hilda herself might have done better to heed Zelda’s warnings, and she is no longer so convinced that things will always come round right if you let your instincts guide you.

She waits until the sounds of their fight have dissipated, until someone has slammed the front door. There is another door slam, and the world-weary sigh from the general direction of the kitchen is unmistakably Ambrose’s. In due time he is gone as well, and Hilda rises, is faced with the dilemma of what to wear.

She emerges from her room looking more haphazard than usual, and laundry is the first thing she does. Hilda ventures into the kitchen once the washer is merrily spinning her clothes, expects that the familiarity will be her balm in Gilead, is emotionally gut-punched when that, too, is ripped away from her.

This is not her kitchen, not the cradle of her being, not anymore. The coffeemaker is new and resting in a place where the Spellmans have never kept coffeemakers before. Somebody tried to cook lasagna last night, failed miserably, if the casserole dish shards and flecks of tomato sauce on absolutely every surface are any indication. What was once the breakfast table is now a graveyard for discarded papers—Portuguese, Cantonese, Russian and Swedish, some backdated as much as a week and a half, all bearing circular coffee stains and remnants of cigarette ash.

Hilda sighs, because Zelda really is a slob when left to her own devices, only appears constantly collected and put-together because she has a sister to clean up after her. Hilda has been lamenting the injustice of it since she was five years old. And, just as she’s done since age five, she sets about righting what Zelda has ruined. She feels only slightly better when she finds evidence that the mess isn’t only Zelda’s, in the form of a stray page of Sumerian translations (on the far counter, under a jar of Hilda’s sweet relish) and an abandoned pair of neon-pink earbuds in the silverware drawer.

She continues on this way, loses herself in the rhythm of cleaning until the clock chimes two. And then Hilda looks at her handiwork, realizes that she should feel good about the progress she’s made, but can summon up nothing more than a sense of vague confusion. Was—is—this her? Is this how she used to spend her days? Is it enough, now, can it ever be? And if not…

Zelda comes home at three and there is, as ever, no sign of her sister. She has scratches on her back and dried mascara smudged under one eye. She taught three periods with her makeup this way, will weep again when she finally looks into a mirror and realizes it. 

She can’t suppress her gasp when she enters the kitchen, surveys the scene. Food mess wiped up, breakfast table clean, newspapers folded neatly on the sideboard. The room smells of citrus and baking, and the corn muffins in a bowl atop the island are still warm. Zelda touches one with something approaching reverence, palms it and feels her knees give way. She sinks into a chair, holds onto the muffin so hard it crumbles beneath her fingers, and Zelda barely notices, so lost is she in contemplation of what this might mean.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------

Ambrose pads down the stairs, so lost in his lingering sleep haze that he almost misses a step, catches himself just before he goes sprawling to the carpet.

“Smooth, Spellman,” he mutters to himself, grateful that everyone else is still abed.

Auntie Hilda used to get up at the crack of dawn, but she has been…well, he’s unsure exactly _what_ she’s been, or why, but he knows that Aunt Zee, in her own harsh way, is right. This has gone on for too long. The whole house is on edge, worried out of their minds, and no one will say anything, because the Spellman way has always been to let everything built up until it explodes. Nothing ever gets resolved or ameliorated around here without Aunt Hilda to navigate them through moments of tension, and the last few weeks have proven that a thousand times over.

He stops outside his youngest aunt’s door, considers knocking. Ambrose is unsure if he should be the one to bring this to apotheosis, but if not him, then who? He shrinks back at the last moment, though, feels that this is not his place, can’t imagine why he should think that, but he can't get past it.

Hilda in the middle of the kitchen is the last thing he expects to see when he goes to start the coffee, but there she is, and Ambrose only avoids screaming out by reminding himself that his aunt is not a specter because she is not, in fact, dead, despite how they’ve all been mourning her. He catches her carefully situating a filter in the coffee machine’s receptacle, comes to rest against the island and watches her reach for the bag of dark roast. Hilda is silent, but her face is a mute plea, and Ambrose takes the hint, simply smiles and says, “Blessed morning, Auntie.”

“Blessed morning, child,” replies Hilda. She brews the coffee, Ambrose leaves as a knock sounds at the front door, comes back with newspapers in hand, sets all but the local Greendale periodical at Zelda’s customary place.

Zelda herself appears fewer than fifteen minutes later. She stands in the doorway for a long while, watching Hilda methodically lay bacon strips in a frying pan. Her expression is unreadable, and Hilda does not look at her, is relieved when Zelda finally sits down, disappears behind a gossip rag from some village in Saskatchewan. Now as always, the kindest thing Zelda could possibly do for her is to simply keep her mouth shut.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------

The silence lingers for days, and this is fine with Hilda, even if she does occasionally find herself considering what, exactly, Zelda is thinking behind the barrier of her perfectly-coiffed hair and meticulously lipsticked pout. Of course, she does not ask, does not, indeed, make any attempt to initiate conversation. Not about her weeks-long absence or what prompted it, nor about Zelda’s new job (which she only finds out about from Sabrina). Not even about the weather.

Hilda knows that it is meant to be her move, now. This is how it has always worked, Zelda stony-faced and Hilda trying anything-- _anything_ \--just to get a word out of her. It is foreign and lonesome, not speaking to her sister, but Hilda refuses to play. This game, as far as she’s concerned, is over. She has no appetite for it anymore, has decided that Zelda may keep her secrets and her anger and whatever else she’s tending in the soured ground of her heart.

Zelda is still playing, and she makes a good go of it, for an impressive stretch of time. But one evening, her newspaper is gone and she cannot abide it. She’s had a horrid day at the Academy; some seventeen-year-old who thinks he’s a little Casanova actually had the nerve to proposition her, and then Faustus did the same when she went to complain. And she turned him down, found her balls finally, batted his hands away and left his office blessedly untouched, yet paradoxically feeling as used as she always does after spending more than five minutes in his presence. Tonight, she just wants to forget, to curl up in the parlor with her shoes off and a cup of her sister’s tea and something distracting to read, but her diversion is nowhere to be found.

“Hilda, where is my newspaper from this morning?”

“It’s not on the sideboard?” Hilda’s voice is far away, and her gaze never leaves the romaine and carrots she’s trying to fashion into a proper salad.

“No, it is not on the damn sideboard. What have you done with it?”

A shrug, and Hilda grabs another carrot to chop. “I suppose I threw it out, then.”

Zelda is torn between reaching for the knife block and wanting to cry. “Why would you do that?”

Hilda’s mouth presses into a stark line.

“Because,” she replies, “The last time you were loose in this kitchen, you turned it into a pigsty. I won’t let it get that way again, not after I went to all the trouble of cleaning it up.”

Hilda’s instincts are finely-tuned after so many decades of death and rebirth, of studying her older sister’s features for the slightest hint of trouble. They tell her to be afraid as Zelda’s lips purse and her eye twitches, a tell that Hilda has known since nursery days, that even Zelda herself is not aware of. Everything in Hilda screams at her to tread lightly, or, better yet, to bolt. That would probably be the smartest course of action, but she holds firm.

“Oh?” Zelda asks, advancing on her now, “Which time are you referring to, sister? The two weeks and three days you’ve spent throwing tantrums in your room like a teenager? Leaving me—leaving _us_ —to fend for ourselves?”

Hilda wants to protest, because she cannot be held responsible. She was not herself; she was broken and hurting. She is _still_ hurting; can Zelda not see that? Hilda opens her mouth to say as much, but only her sister’s name comes out, and her tone is weak, voice shaky, and there’s satisfaction in Zelda’s expression. This is normal; this is right. This is their proper dynamic, and the sooner they get back to it, the better.

She advances further, pushes harder, because it’s been so long since they’ve had a proper row, since they’ve even talked, and _this_ is what Zelda has been missing. Maybe if she’s lucky, Hilda will cry, and Zelda will feel better, if only temporarily. Her satisfaction at hurting Hilda never lasts. She will be awake all night feeling awful, remembering each one of Hilda’s tears. But for now, Zelda herself is too raw, too hurt, to consider that.

“Or, Hilda, maybe you’re talking about just a few months ago, when you dropped everything and practically walked out on your family to get your rocks off with some pathetic mortal in the back of a trashy little bookshop?”

Hilda’s tears spring forth like a sacrament, and Zelda is immensely pleased with herself, right up to the moment she hears the crack of skin connecting with her skin, feels pain licking across her cheek.

Hilda’s still crying, but there’s more than distress on her face now. She looks awestruck, almost drunk. She hasn’t hit Zelda since 1947. It feels better than anything has a right to, so good, in fact, that Hilda is distracted and doesn’t feel her sister’s retaliatory blow until it’s already landed on her own cheek. She does, however, react to it, and pure animal compulsion has her lunging forward to grab a rough handful of red-gold hair at the exact moment Zelda bunches her fist in Hilda’s cardigan.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------

Luke sinks down into the nest of pillows at the head of Ambrose’s bed, watches his lover make his way across the room to the record player. Ambrose is all tousled hair and lazy grace, his skin sheened in sweat and silken robe only loosely hiding his nakedness. He looks so good, Luke can almost forgive the fact that Ambrose selects Alice Cooper for their post-coital soundtrack.

“‘Poison?’ Really?” he asks. Ambrose shrugs.

“It’s been in my head all day,” he explains, draws a chuckle from Luke.

“All right, then.” 

He is on the verge of beckoning Ambrose back when a crash from downstairs startles them both. Luke springs up, follows his boyfriend to the entryway of the room. Another bang, and then women’s voices, loud, frantic, something shattering. Luke turns to Ambrose in alarm.

“Should…should we go down there and make sure your aunts are okay?”

Ambrose strains to listen, makes out a vicious yell: “You’re my sister! Why can you not just _love me_ like you’re meant to?”

“Fuck no,” he says, closing the door and turning up the music.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------

Hilda’s ears are ringing and she is tired, doesn’t know how much longer she can keep this up. She’s never actually fought anyone before, didn’t realize how much it can take out of you. But Zelda, always the more bloodthirsty of the two of them, is still going strong, looks like she can—and probably would be more than happy to—beat the ever-loving hell out of Hilda all night. 

The sight of her, hair undone from its pins, smears of blood and lipstick running into each other on one milky cheek, enfolds Hilda in memory.

Zelda, eleven years old, butter-yellow Sunday dress dirtied and ripped, one lace ribbon coming loose from its pigtail. Felicity LaVey’s nose blood smeared over her knuckles. Why? Because she teased Hilda after Black Mass, pinched her arm so hard it made her cry, left a mark. Nothing Zelda hadn’t done herself, but it was different, this time. It’s always different when it’s someone else hurting Hilda. And Hilda remembers that night, too, Zelda all clean from her bath, comforting Hilda even though she was still sore from Papa's belt. Zelda taking her little sister's hand, pressing her lips to the place where Felicity’s nails broke skin, and there goes all Hilda’s will to continue hitting her sister.

The force of her magic stops Zelda’s descending blow, pushes her back against a counter and holds her stationary. And Zelda fights, but Hilda maintains her grip. If she lets her sister go, they will both end up on the floor, kicking legs and swinging fists until one of them is cold and the other is digging up the Cain pit. For once, she is unsure who would claim victory and who would end up buried, doesn’t want to find out.

She approaches Zelda as the older witch fights to free herself. Hilda comes as close as she dares, surveys the damage done. She’s almost proud when she sees that Zelda looks as bad as she feels. There are scratch marks on her left cheek, beaded with blood, and come tomorrow her right eye will be one gigantic bruise. She flinches as Hilda’s fingers graze her cheekbone.

“Let me go.” Zelda sounds truly feral, and Hilda shakes her head, watches as her sister continues to struggle before finally giving up.

Their eyes connect, Zelda’s cornflower blue blazing into Hilda’s deep sapphire. There is ire in Zelda’s gaze, yes, menace, too, just like there always is when Hilda’s screwed up or when she’s just in the mood to be a bully. But there are tears, too, and her voice is half-growl, half-sob as she says, “I will put you in the ground.”

It’s not the first time Zelda has threatened her this way, nor even the first time she’s done so in exactly those words. But it is the first threat she’s issued with the imprint of Hilda’s nails on her face, her hair undone and tangled by Hilda’s hands, the evidence of Hilda’s pain and frustration all over her.

And Hilda doesn’t understand why Zelda’s words collude with the sight of her to hit her so low-down in her stomach, to send a shiver clawing through her, raising goosebumps and tightening her nipples against the fabric of her shapeless dress. Neither sister is prepared when Hilda surges forward, looks for all the world like she’s about to do what Zelda has done to her a hundred times. Both heave a collective sigh when Hilda fastens her lips to Zelda’s, kissing her so hard it hurts, holding her immobilized by magic and refusing to let go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is always where I wanted this story to go and how I wanted Hilda and Zelda to hook up, but I still had trouble writing the Spellman Fight Club bits. Please treat me like I'm Satan and praise me in the comments so that I feel like I did a good job.
> 
> Also, next chapter the rating goes up to E so, like, hopefully that makes up for any of this chapter's shortcomings.


	7. I've always been a coward and never know what's good for me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This...turned out slightly kinkier than I originally intended, but these ideas just came and I was like, "yeah that seems like something Zelda would be into and possibly Hilda would like too (or at least the Hilda of my 'Hilda is secretly a freak under all those cardigans' headcanon)" so I just went with it.
> 
> Also, this chapter is feat. My explanation for why Hilda has a British accent and Zelda doesn't.

As far as Hilda knows, it has always just been this, her skin and Zelda’s skin and nothing in between but heat and something primal that could either be comfort or low-thrumming desire or a mélange of the two. This is the essence of her first memory, undefined, writ mostly in shapes and sensation. Hilda starved for touch, crying out for it, Zelda lifting her fragile body from the crib, Zelda bringing her in close, cheek-on-cheek, rocking, singing.

She knows that Zelda did a lot of that when they were small, was the only one willing to, as far as she can gather. Papa was absent from the nursery, because childrearing simply wasn’t what men did back then. Some old traditions are best tossed right out the window, and, when Sabrina was tiny, when Leticia was still with them, Hilda used to watch Ambrose administering a bottle or walking the baby about the parlor, and thank Satan that the near-prohibition against men doing their fair share seemed to have fallen by the wayside.

It wasn’t machismo that kept Edward away from her nursery, but simply age and disinterest. After all, what use does a ten-year-old boy have for a baby sister? And Mama—well, Mama was _weary_. By the time Hilda quickened her womb, Mama was getting too old to still be having children, really, and there had been signs and warnings of it long before the youngest Spellman was a gleam in her Papa’s eye. In the four years between Zelda and Hilda, there was a brother born dead, a sister who came far too early, spent three days choking for breath before turning blue in her bassinet, and one who was never born at all. No wonder that, after two days of difficult labor which she and Hilda were both lucky to survive, Mama was cautiously detached.

Papa called his youngest daughter “miracle baby.” Mama, superstitious, called her nothing at all for the better part of a year, rarely saw her, held her only once. And once was enough; Hilda squalled until she was red as Father Satan’s own flames, nearly writhed right out of Mama’s arms, and that was the last time that was attempted. After that, it was only Zelda. Zelda who told her stories, taught her to count and spell, lamented Hilda’s wayward wiggliness as she tried to put her in jumpers or stockings. Zelda who buttressed her against bad dreams at night.

At four, Hilda had sincerely believed that Zelda was her mother. Hilda at nearly two hundred recognizes the impossibility of it, is still not convinced that she doesn’t belong to Zelda nonetheless. That Zelda didn’t somehow make her, didn’t reach into the beyond to drag out Hilda’s soul and wrap it up in her very own flesh.

They are more alike than they are different, always have been, even if Hilda is the only one who sees it. Both of them starved for affection and deeply in denial about how much they are really lacking. The pair of them without a clue how to seek out what they need, how to hold it once it’s been found, much less to recognize it when it’s right under their noses. Bound together in mutual misery and both heaven-bent on remaining that way even when there is no reason why they should have to.

And neither of them able to live without the other. They’ve proven that time and time again. Zelda proved it in her youth, fucking her way around Europe and Asia only to come right back to Greendale in the end. Hilda did her own version of that, jumping at any chance to study abroad in London or visit the cousins in the Cotswolds, to get as far as possible from Zelda and the murder hand that became more adept each time she drove one of their great-grandfather’s old swords into her sister (young Zelda had a flair for the dramatic; it was only later in life that she learned to appreciate the economy of whatever is at hand).

Even through all the killing, all the rowing, the running away, they always came back together, did they not? Even Cee was just a distraction, and Hilda knew it all the while. Didn’t love him any less for it, didn’t hurt any less now, but she can see how not fighting for their relationship, walking out of his shop and never returning, really had been the greatest kindness she could show him. It will never be anyone but Zelda, even if Zelda doesn’t want her. Possibly _because_ Zelda doesn’t want her; Hilda has never claimed to be sane and well-adjusted. She’s just the Spellman with the greatest talent for hiding the darker bits of herself, because sweet Satan, someone’s had to all these years, or else none of them would have made it.

But burying all of her frustration in cakes and casseroles and cleaning doesn’t change anything, doesn’t erase the fact that all Hilda has ever wanted was simply to sink into Zelda. She has spent all of her life wanting this, unable to articulate it, scarcely aware of what, exactly, it even meant. It was only with Cee that she could begin to understand. There were moments when she would turn around and catch him looking at her in a certain way, and Hilda would know, with gut-punch certainty, that this is how she’s been looking at Zelda since puberty at least, possibly longer.

And when she was beneath him, when she took him in, Hilda slowly came to realize that this was how she wanted her sister, too, and she was hard-pressed not to cry out for Zelda with him inside of her. Zelda was always there, in Cee’s bed, in the back storage room, on Cee’s sofa and, once, his dining table. His arms had held her the way that Zelda’s should have, his mouth covering and fingers slipping into places that were meant only for Zelda.

Hilda tastes her sister’s tongue and understands why nothing else has ever worked, why nothing else can.

Zelda’s lips move beneath hers, and there’s a groan, the jagged edge of a word, and Hilda braces herself to be shattered. Zelda is still trapped, cannot push her away, but she will protest, will tell her _stop, no, get off_. And Hilda will obey, because she doesn’t want this if Zelda doesn’t, and how in Satan’s name could Zelda possibly? The older witch will end this, and then Hilda will have to run away and slit her own throat, offer herself up as a paltry sacrifice to whatever deity might take her, because how will they get by now that she’s ruined everything?

But when Zelda speaks, there is no protest, no accusation, there is only her name, and from Zelda’s mouth it sounds like lust made word. And it’s followed by the older witch trying to come forward, meeting the barrier of Hilda’s magic, and she frowns when she realizes it, looks desperate.

“Hilda, I…” Zelda cannot finish, and her moon-pale skin is patched over in pink, and all at once, Hilda realizes what it really means, to have her sister like this, helpless and straining for her, and the new knowledge is an electric jolt from her sternum to the crux of her thighs.

“What, sister?” Her tone is gentler than she meant it to be, but it is, after all, her first time in any role even resembling that of dominatrix, so she cuts herself a bit of slack. One hand cups Zelda’s cheek, and she winces as Hilda presses into the bruise she herself made there, and now Hilda’s the one moaning and flushing. Her free hand is drawn up from her side, rests on Zelda’s thigh, her skin an inferno even through the burgundy velvet of her dress.

“Hilda…Hilda I want you…”

Hilda slides her hand beneath the softness of fabric, and her eyes don’t leave Zelda’s as she asks, “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to touch me…”

“I am touching you,” Hilda points out, and she’s carefully, maddeningly innocent, but her nails scrape Zelda’s flesh, lightly at first and then she sinks in, expects Zelda to cry out, but instead the older witch’s breaths come harder, as though each ragged one is torn out of her.

“Hilda…sweet Beelzebub, Hilda, fuck me!”

 _Praise Satan_. Hilda pushes Zelda’s panties aside and drives her finger home at long last. There is a sense of relief at feeling her sister all around her, slick and pulsing. So many years, decades, centuries of wanting this, wanting nothing more than this but never being able to put a name to what she wanted, never realizing that the cure for everything that was wrong inside her was just this, just Zelda. Discovering Zelda is discovering herself.

“More,” Zelda pants, and Hilda’s happy to give it to her, to pull away for just a second—an interminable instant in which the sisters mutually ache for one another—before plunging back in, two fingers, harder, deeper, faster, anything Zelda asks for in between moans and gasps. Her hands and arms are still fixed in place, but her hips are free, and they travel everywhere, can’t be stopped as she presses up and into her sister’s hand.

“Hilda,” she rasps, straining to get closer but still immobilized, “Kiss me, sister.” Hilda remains where she is, and Zelda whimpers, then begs: “Please.”

What else can Hilda do but go to her, especially when she wants it as much as Zelda does, thinks that she probably wants it more, because she has no way of knowing that Zelda has yearned for this, too.

Their mouths come together, and Hilda’s bleeding from where her lower lip split under Zelda’s palm, and Zelda knows she should be disgusted, should absolutely not bite down on the wound and swallow both Hilda’s blood and her throaty groan, and nor should Hilda gasp and quiver under her sister’s ministrations. She is almost ashamed of the jolt that Zelda’s teeth send through her, at the way she responds, panting hard and driving into her sister harder, so hard it almost hurts. And that, combined with Hilda’s nails breaking the skin on her thigh, is enough to have Zelda coming, writhing on Hilda’s fingers and screaming against her mouth.

Hilda pulls away once the older witch’s hips have stilled, and Zelda mourns the loss of her sister’s warmth, the solidness of her. She wants to fall forward into Hilda, to wrap her up in her arms, kiss her, make love to her, too, if that is what Hilda wants. But when the fog of orgasm has fully lifted, Hilda is on the other side of the kitchen, is about to cross into the foyer when, as if it’s an afterthought, she turns around, snaps her fingers, and then Zelda is released, free to crumple to the floor when her legs won’t hold her, to rub her wrists where they’ve gone numb, to watch Hilda disappear around a corner.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hours later, Hilda comes downstairs to clean up the mess in the kitchen, finds that there’s no need. Not only has everything been put away, scrubbed and washed exactly to her specifics, but things are, if anything, even tidier than Hilda herself generally leaves them. She returns to her room unsure of what, exactly, she is to make of this.

And when Zelda is brushing her hair out for bed, there is a knock at her bedroom door. _Sabrina_ , she thinks reflexively, having teleported over from the Academy after doing something stupid and realizing that she desperately needs her aunts’ help. She goes to the door wondering what it will be this time, what kind of disaster she’ll be responsible for clearing up. But when she opens the door she is met with no disaster, no Sabrina, nothing but a small tin left on the floor which, upon inspection, turns out to contain Hilda’s healing salve.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Killing Hilda was always the most effective way to return the sisters to the state of tenuous neutrality that had been their default since Zelda left Hilda alone in the nursery. That fragile peace was the closest they came to affection these days—Kate Bush on the radio, Zelda pouring over the Vladivostok bi-weekly and Hilda piling fresh pancakes onto a plate. It never lasted long, of course. Zelda got into A Mood, and Hilda played the part of daffy little sister too well, ramped up the desperate enthusiasm when she saw the gleam in Zelda’s eye, only succeeded in hastening the inevitable. The murder is a convenient reset mechanism, returning them to the experimental 80’s pop Hilda likes and Zelda tolerates, morning coffee and almost-amicable silence.

It is the best kind of revelation to find that getting fucked by Hilda works just as well.

Zelda finds her sister’s familiars spinning webs in a corner of her bedroom—apparently the stupid little things have failed to realize Hilda doesn’t live there anymore—spends half an hour yelling at her sister to keep the beasts under control, ends up bent over the breakfast table with Hilda inside her, unable to discern whether it’s Hilda’s hair pulling or her lips soft at the back of her neck that has her falling so utterly to pieces. And then it’s back to routine.

Just under two weeks later, Zelda returns from the Academy after her most difficult day yet. Faustus cannot handle rejection, is actively making her job harder than it need be. She shares only the barest details with the family, and it is Sabrina who takes one for the team and suggests that perhaps she should simply quit. She is not trying to be nasty; she’s long since made peace with Zelda’s proximity to her school life.

But Zelda takes it the wrong way, as is her wont, digs her heels in and instigates a row with her niece, the one person in the house who is usually safe from her free-floating wrath. After Sabrina has stormed off to her room and Ambrose is safely down in the mortuary, Hilda takes Zelda to task for bullying their niece, backs up the girl’s earlier suggestion: if Zelda is going to come home every day acting and feeling this way, then maybe she would be better off without the job.

Zelda knows how to cut deepest, does everything she can to absolutely shred her sister. She says that the fact that Hilda so fully botched her brief stint of gainful employment does not mean that Zelda, too, is incapable of holding down a job. Incompetence and poor judgment are not familial traits, Satan be praised. This earns her a smack across the face, which she answers with one of her own, and the fight ends with Hilda pushing Zelda into a chair and dropping to her knees to do things with her mouth that she absolutely should not know how to do, because there’s no way some lunatic Dracula wannabe could have taught her anything this good.

The rules of this game are not clearly defined; the sisters make it up as they go along. Sometimes the main event is preceded by a slap, a shove, even, once, an especially aggressive pinch, sometimes not. Hilda is more aggressive at some times than others, raking nails down her back or sinking fingers into Zelda’s hips forcefully enough to bruise. Occasionally, though, Hilda is soft, gentle, and it is almost like they are making love. Zelda will not admit to herself that these are the encounters she treasures most.

She is aware that none of this is normal or rational or healthy; they both are. But when has their relationship ever been? This seems a reasonable enough evolution for the game of murder and resurrection they have been locked in since Hilda’s sixteenth year. At least now, no one is dying, and Zelda’s dresses and hair and fingernails are no longer getting caked in grave dirt. Hilda seems unharmed enough, and Zelda has no room nor will for complaint, and it keeps the peace.

And of course, because Zelda is who she is, she inevitably has to go and spoil it all.

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------

She’s sat in the wingback chair that came over from England with Grandfather, and the velvet brocade feels positively divine on Zelda’s bare ass, though nothing compares to the softness of Hilda’s tongue through her folds. Her orgasm is hard-won this night, because as wonderful as Hilda feels on and inside her, Zelda can’t stop replaying everything that happened in Faustus’s office earlier in the day. It had become all too obvious that she was going to lose her job one way or the other, and voluntarily resigning at least spared her the embarrassment of being outright sacked, or having to jump through increasingly outrageous hoops to prove her value as a teacher and then ending up fired anyway.

But she still couldn’t put the look on the High Priest’s face out of her mind, still wanted to push Hilda away, teleport over to the Blackwood residence, and take a blunt object to his skull. The smugness in his eyes, the self-satisfied grin, the knowledge that he had won and was reveling in his victory…Zelda will pay him back for that, she is determined to find a way.

Beyond that, the loss of the job itself is affecting her more profoundly than she’d ever guessed it could. Against all odds, and political maneuvering aside, Zelda had simply _enjoyed_ teaching. She was good at it, and her classroom had been a neat little microcosm that she could actually keep under control and functional. It had been so long since anything in Zelda’s life was so settled, so certain, and when had she ever been allowed to pursue something simply because she liked it? Her life had been making Mama and Papa proud, keeping herself squeaky-clean to make Edward look good, and, the last few years, trying to hold the last bedraggled remnants of the Spellman family together, to keep all of their necks out of the noose. Not a lot of time for hobbies, for personal growth, trapped inside of that maelstrom.

Zelda felt the job loss as a personal blow, and everyone in the house had been made to feel her ire, none more so than the two who were still tied to the Academy. She was especially vicious with Ambrose, since he was still working directly underneath the man who had cost Zelda her job. And Hilda played the martyr as she always did, allowed both niece and nephew to take dinner in their rooms, then tried to get Zelda to stop acting like a maniac.

The older witch didn’t remember how, exactly, they made their way into the parlor, how she ended up in Grandfather’s chair with her skirt rucked up to navel height. But thank Satan she had, and thank Satan for Hilda’s mouth, bringing her over the edge at last and succeeding in the near-impossible task of calming Zelda the fuck down.

She is so calm, so blissfully unaware, that she strokes one hand through Hilda’s hair, sighing at the silken feel of it, twining one curl around a finger. And when Hilda stands up, swiping a hand over her mouth, Zelda holds her in place with her arms around Hilda’s waist, her head falling against her rounded stomach. Hilda is unsure what to do, has no context for this, really. Exactly two people have held her like this in her life, and the last time Zelda did it was when they were both prepubescent. And Cee, well, the less she thinks of his arms, the better.

She tries to pull away, and Zelda clings closer, one of her hands clasping Hilda’s, raising it to her lips. The younger woman gasps at the contact, and Zelda misreads, takes it as a go-ahead. 

Hilda’s stomach has gone all jumpy, and it feels good, Zelda’s hand underneath her loose floral dress, creeping up one stockinged thigh. But the sensation is mercurial, and Hilda knows it will not last, will abandon her at the worst possible moment. She is not really feeling what she thinks she is feeling. The pleasure will turn, will sour, and she doesn’t want to do that again, can’t put Zelda through it, either. Cee knew her for four or five months, tops, and she still wasn’t a good enough actress to fool him, so Zelda, who raised her, slept practically right next to her for decades, will catch on immediately. Zelda will know she is pretending, and will actually hate her for it.

“No!” she cries, more sharply than she means to, just as Zelda’s fingers brush the front of her knickers. Zelda jumps back, so quickly and forcefully that she almost knocks the chair over, sends herself toppling with it. She looks at Hilda like she’s been wounded, and Hilda bites her lip, blinks back tears as she whispers, “I’m sorry, sister.”

“It’s not you,” Hilda elaborates, voice shaking, “It’s me. I don’t…I don’t like that…”

She turns away before Zelda can see her cry, wipes at tears as she leaves the room. And Zelda sits there for a good long while, smoothing her rumpled skirt and thinking. Eventually she gets up, goes to the liquor cabinet and pours herself a generous tumbler of scotch. This she nurses while staring off into nothing, debating between rushing upstairs to comfort her sister (Hilda won’t take that well, and she knows it instinctively) and taking the hearse into town, to find a certain bookstore and flay its owner alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song for this chapter is "Hounds of Love" by Kate Bush, which I feel slightly bad about defiling by including it in a chapter where sisters fuck and drink each other's blood, but also Bush herself has said that the song is about running away from love because you're afraid that if it catches you, it will rip you to pieces (I'm horribly paraphrasing an interview I read once) and really, is anything more appropriate for these two? Also I kind of feel like Hilda would really like Kate Bush?


	8. Where do we go, where do we go now?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING: Sexual trauma and its aftermath

Hilda touches Zelda. Zelda does not touch back. So it is and so it has been since Hilda’s baptism. Hilda is unsure why their relationship died when she ascended into full coven membership. She just knows that she tried to throw her arms around her sister after the ceremony, and Zelda’s words were a slap in the face: “Time to put away childish things, Hildegard.” And then Zelda went, somber, toward the tree line, lost to the deep woods orgies taking place all around them, and Hilda went home, already wishing that she could erase her name from the book.

These days, she tells herself that it signifies nothing in particular, when she stands over Zelda’s chair as the older witch lectures their niece, hands braced on the back, only occasionally skimming the broadcloth at her sister’s shoulder. Means nothing, when she and Zelda sit with clients, side-by-side on the bench in their office, playing their separate roles. Hilda consoles, Zelda creates structure and order from the chaos of mortal ruination. She’s good at that.

Even while Zelda plans and organizes, and the families of the departed reign in their emotions, Hilda sits too close to her sister, does it on purpose. She blames it on the smallness of the bench, the broad span of her own hips. Fidgets close again when Zelda pushes her away. She's hungry, forever ravenous for her sister’s skin-warmth, the caress of Zelda’s merino on her breezy cotton.

Hilda’s always been tactile to a dangerous degree. She reached for the parlor fire at five, and Zelda scolded her while bandaging her hands: “How could you be so foolish? Did you not know it would hurt?” Of course she did. She had seen Papa or Edward jump back from the sparks after stoking. She knew there was peril there, but she needed to know _how_ it would hurt. How the flames would feel, slithering against her palm, exactly how her nerves would vibrate under that heat.

She never learned not to touch, not to reach. Hence Zelda. Hence shoulder skimming through suit jackets, hands jolting out to soothe even when Zelda slapped them away, when even the whisper of a caress could bring pain and death. There was a thrill in that, too. What type of agony could the blade bring, the belladonna in Hilda’s English Breakfast, the descent from the second floor landing that was almost rapture until it ended with her body undone by the foyer parquet.

How will it hurt her when Zelda decides she no longer wants this new, far more dangerous kind of touching, cannot abide Hilda’s hands, her tongue, goldenrod hair soft on even softer thigh flesh? Will Zelda kill her again, when she grows tired of Hilda’s sex? Will it be forever this time? The purloined moments of intimacy are worth finding out.

With Zelda, Hilda tries, harder than she did with Cee. She digs deeper, licks more fervently, sucks with more enthusiasm. It is not as difficult this time, not hard at all, really. She supposes that she’s simply better at it now, more practiced, less squeamish. She’s almost shocked at how easily it comes, how easily Zelda does. How Hilda can _make_ her.

But still Zelda does not touch, until one day she does. Fingers in Hilda’s hair, hand on her thigh. Like Cee, but not like him at all. Hilda only reluctantly followed him to all the places his touches led. She thinks she could let Zelda take her anywhere, if she could get over her fear of the journey. Big “if,” nearly unthinkable.

And even after Hilda runs away, cries in her room—“like a ninny,” says the inner monologue that has always taken on her sister’s voice—Zelda still touches. Little things. An almost-collision of bodies, an instant of velvet skirt on cotton-poly dress hem and then it’s done. Pinkies meeting over puzzle pieces.

One morning the tea kettle begins to steam but has yet to whistle, and Hilda does not notice. Her thoughts are flitting all around the kitchen, from sister to niece to tonight’s stew to the strawberry patch, over-verdant. Cee’s face sneaks in and Hilda’s eyes are glassy and she’s a millisecond away from a burn when Zelda catches her wrist, moves her arm away from the kettle’s spout.

“Thank you, sister,” says Hilda, absently. She is still _away_ , even with Zelda’s hand as anchor, but then Sabrina asks for peach preserves and saves them all.

And Zelda knows what’s on her sister’s mind but doesn’t remark, and she doesn’t stop touching. Hands on Hilda’s hips, moving her aside when Zelda needs something from a cabinet. A brush of fingers when Hilda gives over the morning paper. Nothing intimate. Sabrina doesn’t even notice. Ambrose does, is smart enough not to comment. Hilda feels each touch as she does everything else in the world: right down to her marrow.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hilda does not know what they have been waltzing around the last week or so, but she’s danced as adroitly as she can, let Zelda take the lead because she is the one with the problem, not Hilda. She will spit it out eventually, or gouge it into Hilda’s skin, moan it into the late-evening air while Hilda’s fucking her. One way or another, it will out, and the younger witch is patient.

Zelda is not. The door has barely closed behind their charges when she sidles up to her sister, watching Hilda scrape oatmeal off the sides of a pot. She reaches out to still her hand. Eyes spark and Hilda waits.

“I just want you to know,” says Zelda, “That if you’d like me to kill him, I’ll do so gladly.”

Hilda drops the pot reflexively, sends flecks of breakfast beige all over the stove.

“ _Excuse me_? Kill whom? And for what?”

“That man,” Zelda elaborates, “That horrid mortal at the bookstore. Clearly he did something to you. He hurt you. And if you ask me to, Hilda, I promise I will ensure that he regrets it.”

Hilda is torn between bitter laughter and outright terror, because the thought of _Cee_ hurting _her_ …but of course Zelda would think that, with her distrust of any and all mortals. And she is more than capable of making good on her vow…

“Satan’s hoof, Zelda; he didn’t do anything to me. Why would you think he did?”

It’s a ridiculous question, and Hilda knows that the moment it’s asked. There’s a refreshing sense of business as usual in the way Zelda arches her brows, rolls her eyes. Hilda spares her from having to say it, because if there’s one thing she’s tired of hearing about, it’s how _pathetic_ it was of her to disappear into her room for weeks on end, how _childish_ and _irresponsible_.

“Zelda…” she begins, struggles to explain herself in a way that her sister can comprehend. There is no way to discuss this without making herself vulnerable, and experience has made Hilda wary. The only thing Zelda knows about vulnerability is that it leaves her prey wide open for attack.

“Zelda,” she repeats, clenches her jaw and stares at the ceiling, the dishes in the sink, the dirty pot, anything but her sister, “Cee was the one to end things, that’s true. But he did it because I…”

“What?” Zelda asks. For a moment she is hopeful, thinks that Hilda might say “Because I wouldn’t sleep with him.” But of course that bridge has been crossed and burned, and Zelda well knows it. She recalls the shift in her sister’s magic, the pale candlelight yellow that surrounded her from birth to three months ago not _changed_ , exactly, but tinged. Hilda’s more golden now, even more luminous. It’s the same thing that shifted in Zelda on her sixteenth birthday, when she went into the woods champagne and emerged blazing ruby and knew she could never go back, and nor can Hilda.

“I…well, I could never be…fully with him,” Hilda sputters, “When we were _together_ , you know. I didn’t like it. I don’t, rather.”

Zelda very visibly does not understand, and Hilda gives her a moment, recognizes the exact instant she catches the meaning, because her eyes go wide and wild, and Hilda sees her remembering. The kitchen. The parlor. The office. Flesh and blood and _burning_.

“No,” she breathes, rushes to her sister, “No, Zelds, it’s not…it’s all right, with you. It’s…you’re _you_.”

Zelda’s trembling now, petrified. Her mouth will form no words, her tongue is ash.

“Zelds…” Hilda reaches out to touch, to soothe, to circle her sister’s lower back with a palm.

“I like touching you,” she says, almost a whisper, “I like how you feel. But I just didn’t like it…with him. And I don’t think I can enjoy being touched, myself. Do you see what I mean?”

Zelda does not, has never even heard of such a thing, but she nods nevertheless, and when her pulse has ceased jackhammering her temples, she turns to Hilda and hates herself for asking, but must have clarification: “But he didn’t…”

“No! No, he never _forced_ me into anything. What made you believe that?”

Her hand finds Zelda’s on the countertop, and then Hilda understands. All at once she knows, and she becomes progressively more ill as she assimilates it all. Blackwood, Blackwood and Zelda, her sister hurting, weeping. Not willing, not in any real way, and Hilda can see Zelda’s face so empty as she simply allows it. He would have known, and he didn’t stop, and she will _obliterate_ him. She’ll murder him a thousand times over for every scratch he left on Zelda, will rip each of his ridiculous, clawed fingernails off, one by one, so he can never leave his mark on any other woman, ever again.

Her head spins with blood curses, the things she has in this very kitchen that could get one started. And surely Sabrina can get a bit of the prick’s disgusting, grease-slick hair. Or Ambrose, maybe; he’s closer and more subtle…

Zelda has gone white and rigid next to her, and one look is enough to tell Hilda that Zelda knows what she’s seen. Satan _bless_ Hilda for using that ability, for even _having_ it, Zelda thinks. Only one out of every hundred or so witches can do it, and that one had to be the person who’s almost always in mind-reading distance of her.

“Hilda, don’t…” she says, jumps away like she’s made of static.

“I’m sorry, sister.” Hilda means it; she is so very, very sorry, and that makes it worse.

“Don’t!” Zelda hisses. Her mouth trembles and her hands go up, advance as if to clasp Hilda’s neck, drop halfway. And then she is simply stood in the middle of their kitchen, broken as the porcelain doll (Hilda’s favorite, hair in ringlets, dress the same cornflower blue as Zelda’s irises) that she kicked in when she and Hilda were girls.

She raises one shaking hand, cannot look at her sister. “Just…don’t…” she whispers, then turns and runs off.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hilda knocks softly on her sister’s door, does not expect a reply. It seemingly opens on its own, and there’s only a silhouette of Zelda sat on her bed, but Hilda wouldn’t be able to get in if Zelda didn’t want her, so she proceeds.

“Yes, Hilda?” Zelda tries for her usual imperious drawl, fails more spectacularly than Hilda has seen her do in decades. She moves to the bedside table, sets down the cup and saucer.

“I don’t need any tea tonight, sister,” says Zelda.

“It’s not tea,” Hilda replies. She is about to take her place next to Zelda when she spies the cat o’nine tails lurking, viperous, among the folds of the comforter. She looks sharply at Zelda, is met with an eye roll.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” she says, “I haven’t used it.”

Well, not _tonight_. But recently, yes. The faded edge of old crimson on the leather strips betrays Zelda, but _this_ is not a conversation the older witch is ready to have, so Hilda simply tosses the damned thing off to one side of the room. Tomorrow she will burn it; tonight, she’s here for Zelda, lowers herself onto the mattress next to her. Thighs touching.

Zelda maintains the contact as she leans over to inspect the cup. It’s filled nearly to the brim with hot chocolate, thick, inviting, and she’s biting her lip to contain more rogue tears. Only Hilda knows about her sweet tooth.

She lifts the cup, takes a sip, pretends that it’s only to appease Hilda. The chocolate tastes like creeping downstairs at midnight to guess at the contents of her Solstice gifts. Like sledding down the old hill near their house with Teddy behind her. Like her and Hilda, blanket upon blanket strewn over their nursery cot and still too cold unless they were pressed close.

She pronounces it vile, finishes the cup anyway.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Hilda asks, once the cup is back at home on its saucer.

“No,” replies Zelda. Predictable. 

Hilda nods, stands, and Zelda is on the verge of pulling her back when she stops at the vanity, grabs Zelda’s hairbrush. And then Hilda’s at her back, and her hands in Zelda’s hair are divinity in flesh. She is gentle as she works the brush through, reverent when she fingers individual curls. Zelda tries to remember the last time someone admired her like this, does not think anyone ever has, and it’s only now that it occurs to her to find that sad.

Hilda coaxes away the last of her knots and snags and Zelda tries not to weep, knows there is no point. The tears are coming although she is emphatically not prepared for them, and she hates the immediacy with which Hilda sets down the brush, brings her in close, the younger witch’s cheek between her shoulder blades. Like she knew, like she was prepared for this. And of course she was; of course that’s why she came, and the thought only makes Zelda cry harder.

Hilda meets each sob with a consoling word, a caress. She shifts until she is next to Zelda, and the older witch is leaning on her, Hilda’s weight the only bulwark against her tumble into the abyss.

“Shh, darling; it’s all right,” whispers Hilda. She’s moving back now, spreading out among the sheets and pillows, bringing Zelda with her until they are laying side-by-side. Like when they were children, except back then it was always Hilda crying to Zelda, skinned knees and lost hair ribbons and the other children’s cruelty after Black Mass.

Zelda sang to her then, sometimes “Hush, Little Baby,” sometimes “Baa Baa Black Sheep.” Hilda’s lullaby choices are more contemporary; she chooses something that Ambrose started baby Sabrina on, years and years ago, and then they’d all had to take up the thread because the little girl liked it so much and some nights, she wouldn’t settle in her crib until she heard it.

“She’s got eyes of the bluest skies, as if they thought of rain. I hate to look into those eyes and see an ounce of pain…”

Zelda smirks through her tears, shakes her head, does not know how this spark of normality is like manna to her sister.

“Really, Hilda?” Her voice is almost back to its regular cadence, even through the tears and the snot that Hilda wipes away with the edge of a sheet.

“Hush,” Hilda says, “You don’t hate it as much as you always pretended to.”

She launches into the chorus, and before she’s even finished, Zelda is dead weight in her arms, her chest rising and falling in even rhythm, breath whistling through her stuffed nose, and Hilda can go still and silent herself, curling her limbs around Zelda’s and shutting her eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You'll notice I've upped the chapter count. I fully intended to just continue the raucous bangfest I started last chapter, but then I felt like I had to tie up the Zelda/Blackwood thread and I wasn't about to try and make sex of any kind fit within the framework of this chapter, so I'm adding on to the story. 
> 
> Oh, also: song selection for this chapter brought to you by Guns N' Roses.


	9. Wanting you, I'm lonely and blue, that's what love will do

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all. I've been gone for a little while, and I'm sorry for that. I have severe depression, and when it's at its worst, I'm pretty much only good for lying in bed and watching Buffy with my cat. But coming back and seeing how active the Spellcest community has been definitely helps! I'm so looking forward to catching up and absolutely bombarding you all with comments and Kudos.

Zelda mistrusts routine. The frenetic thrumming of her heart, the squirming in her stomach, do not abate even as the Spellman household settles into something that is not unlike what they had before Sabrina’s sixteenth. Hilda in the kitchen, Zelda in the mortuary, Sabrina at school, Ambrose no longer entirely imprisoned but still mostly housebound, a steady presence at Zelda’s side as they embalm and make up and dress the dead. She is wary of allowing her nephew’s nearness to comfort her too much, of leaning on anyone else in the house or growing complacent. 

The experience of two hundred years has taught her that there are no constants. Nothing in this world can be relied upon for too long, and that used to thrill Zelda. She loved change when she was younger, relished the rush of a new lover, a new city, another country. She cannot now fathom why she should be so afraid of the flow of progress, except that it seems of late, all change has been for the worst.

In the daylight, Zelda keeps each hour filled with tasks both crucial and menial so that she will not have to sit idly waiting for the other shoe to drop. By night, weary under the moonglow and lonelier than she will admit, she dreams, too often and too much. She wakes with the High Priest’s name sour in her mouth, reaches for the bed next to her and grasps empty space.

She will only sometimes cop to missing Hilda. The younger witch would let her sister into bed with her, if Zelda owned up to her nightmares. She might even move her bed back into their room. It’s not impossible, but it is one in a litany of requests she cannot make, and it is trivial compared to what she really wants to ask for: _Please touch me. Why do you not touch me anymore?_

Zelda already knows what Hilda would say to that. Her sister, incapable of willingly harming anyone or anything she loves, is afraid that her hands will not sit well on Zelda’s abused skin. 

And Zelda doesn’t know how to tell her that it wouldn’t hurt, that it never hurts, with Hilda, so she learns to live with her flesh constantly crying out for her sister. It isn’t merely sex, though she’s always had an above-average appetite for it. It is, rather, the little everyday caresses, the delicacy, the reverence of Hilda’s hands on her.

She wants it back, can’t just talk to Hilda like a sane person, so she does the only thing she knows how to do. She puts on a red dress, something short, low-cut, the kind of trash she used to wear to the mortal bars, before Sabrina. A dress that is, categorically, not for mucking around the house. It’s bold, even for Zelda.

Everyone stares as she settles herself at the breakfast table. All eyes take in her curves perfectly outlined, her tousled hair and rouged pout. Sabrina wonders if her antics have finally driven Aunt Zee round the bend, Ambrose very nearly forgets that Zelda _is_ his aunt, and Hilda shakes her head and turns back to the pancakes bubbling in her skillet. 

She remembers this dress, recalls Zelda stumbling home at 3 am with it falling off her shoulders, rucked up to an even less decent length. If she closes her eyes, she can almost smell the cheap perfume Zelda used to blanket herself in when she wanted a one-night mortal man. Hilda hates that dress, hates the way her eyes keep diverting to it.

Ambrose and Sabrina leave, all flushed faces and palpable eagerness to be away. Hilda expects that Zelda will go, too, off to town although it’s much too early for pub crawling. She supposes Zelda’s already found a lover, will be off to meet them and, really, should she be surprised? Did she seriously think that she could be enough for Zelda? Hilda tries very hard not to hurt, at least not out loud, is dumbstruck when Zelda gets up from the table and goes not for the front door, but the stairs leading to the morgue.

Hilda joins her after the dishes are done, and they spend all day arguing as they jointly embalm one corpse and apply cosmetics to a woman whose wake is tomorrow. They bicker over lunch and their afternoon puzzle, and their fighting ends just the way Zelda had hoped. Jigsaw pieces littering the floor, Hilda on her knees, Zelda whining and writhing and coming easily after weeks of nothing.

She returns to Earth and Hilda begins to pull away, and the absence is a slow-settling chill. Zelda reaches out with a whimper, catches Hilda’s wrist and expects to be shaken off, given some excuse about Ambrose or Sabrina returning home soon, dinner needing to be started. Hilda only looks down at Zelda’s hand, moves hers so their palms meet.

“Zelds? What is it, sister?”

“Don’t leave,” whispers Zelda. She tugs lightly on the younger witch’s arm, draws her down to the sofa.

“I’m not going anywhere, love.”

Zelda’s weight settles on her, rose-gold head dropping to her breast. The shining strands over the older woman’s shoulders are just begging to be woven around Hilda’s fingers, and she knows Zelda likes her hair played with, so she indulges both of them, stroking from crown to ends, massaging Zelda’s scalp, earning herself a hazy sigh and her sister’s face burrowing deeper.

“I’ve missed you,” Zelda says, breathing Hilda in, cinnamon and cloves and the earthen smell she’s had since she was a baby.

“I haven’t left, Zelds. I’ve been right here.”

“But not _here_ ,” murmurs Zelda, and Hilda’s brow furrows.

“Zelds…” She angles her head down and beholds the incongruous loveliness of Zelda in her harlot’s dress with eyes shining sincerity and melting tears. Hilda is reduced to frenzied heart and electric lips, can’t help but be drawn in. Her hand is wound up in Zelda’s hair, and when their lips meet, Zelda groans at the salt-sweet taste of herself, the scent of her own musk. She molds her body to her sister’s, takes the younger woman’s moan into her mouth and let it fill her to the brim.

“Hilda…” Her voice is desperate as she moves away, rests her forehead against her sister’s. Zelda’s teeth sink into her lower lip, remembering what Hilda confessed to her, wondering if this is too much. She is about to ask, when Hilda’s arms snake around her waist, pull her down. Curves press to curves as Zelda covers her, raining kisses on her forehead, her cheeks and nose and chin, then her mouth, and there’s that feeling, curling in Hilda’s belly. The one that always preceded disaster with Cee, that she has only allowed herself to feel once with Zelda.

That turned into calamity, too, and she is still unsure, but Zelda is enticement and ecstasy and Hilda _wants_ her. Pleasure begins as a pulse deep in her center and vines out, winding its way through her until her legs are useless and she can feel her nether lips slicked and open, her clit straining and her pelvis drawn up to seek Zelda. The older woman meets her ardor, slender hips rocking against Hilda’s lushness.

She’s on the verge of begging, pleading for she knows not what, when there’s a grinding of metal on metal, a key turning in a lock, and Zelda goes rigid above her, jumps up. Hilda’s still wrapped around her, brought to a sitting position along with her sister. She is the one to break their embrace when the door hinges creak and Sabrina’s voice echoes in the foyer: “Aunties!”

The girl enters the living room, takes in the scattered puzzle pieces on the floor and the general sense of unease.

“What happened here?”

Hilda can only sputter, cast about for a believable lie, but Zelda, for whom dissembling is reflex, swoops in to save her.

“It was your cat, Sabrina,” she drawls, “Salem saw an insect and ruined our puzzle in his excitement. I told you that nothing but trouble could come from a feral familiar.”

She is not at all contrite about lying to her niece, but Hilda watches the girl frown and feels awful when Sabrina apologizes. She rises from the sofa and goes to her, leading her into the kitchen so she can ply Sabrina with cookies and listen to the minutiae of her day of mortal education.

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hilda is, predictably, in the kitchen. She is at the island, keeping vigilant watch over a pot on the stove while spooning something thick and golden into mason jars. A lingering floral-tart scent hangs heavy, triggers memory.

“Apple jelly?” Zelda asks.

“Yes. I’ve been meaning to make up another batch, since my entire cabinet of preserves _somehow_ ended up all over the floor a few months back.”

Zelda’s lips pinch, and she hides behind an Argentinian morning edition. They sit like this for a long while, Hilda canning, Zelda reading, each of them mutually simmering in the tension that is more than anticipation and less than foreplay. It’s routine by now, and it was nice in the wake of Sabrina’s interruption three days ago, but they’ve left it too long and it’s starting to drag.

Eventually it will become too much. One of them will have to budge, by and by, but Hilda is afraid of a hammer to the skull and Zelda fears Leonard Cohen on endless repeat from behind her sister’s bolted door. Both are beyond terrified of what might be if they give in, so they are frozen in place together.

Hilda shuffles to the stove, reaches for the pot, careless hand hitting the burner. She jolts back with a hiss. Zelda is up from the table before the younger witch can focus on anything besides the rapid firing of her nerves. Her hand trembles as Zelda palms it gently, passes over it once, twice, whispering the healing chant she had memorized by seven because Hilda was an accident-prone child. _Plus ca change…_

“Thank you,” mutters Hilda. 

Zelda nods, grabs the pot handle, lifts it, and really, Hilda’s already healing and she could carry it over to the island by herself, but Zelda’s halfway there by the time she musters up and objection. Extraordinarily, she stays where she is after setting the pot down on its trivet. Hilda joins her, passes a jar over, and they work in tandem, spooning jelly and screwing on lids, close enough to feel each other’s heat, far enough away that not even their skirts brush.

It could be 1958 again, Hilda thinks, if not for the silence. She flicks her wrist and the antique radio on the counter crackles to life, tuner adjusting until she’s found an oldies station. As long as the deejay keeps “Unchained Melody” out of the rotation, they will be doing all right.

Zelda relaxes marginally at the sound of the 50’s music she loves. Two songs and five jars later she is even humming, sways her hips when Jerry Butler’s “For Your Precious Love” comes on. Her hip bumps Hilda’s, and the younger woman is done tiptoeing.

Her hand finds Zelda’s, fingers threading, and they move together like they’ve been doing it all their lives. They never did slow dance, though, and that’s a damn shame, Zelda realizes now. Hilda is not especially graceful, but she is substantial in her sister’s arms, steady, sashaying hips and satin-strawberry fragrance. She turns her face up, rises onto her toes, kisses without fury or flame, without demanding.

Hilda is the only one who has ever kissed Zelda this way. Affection for the sake of affection is an enigma. She doesn’t know what to do with it, and her mouth on Hilda’s is timid, her hands clasped unsteadily at the small of her sister’s back. Afraid of asking too much, taking too much. She’s not used to having limits with her lovers, is still not sure what and where Hilda’s are, and it’s terrifying, letting someone else lead.

They break apart, take in air, and Zelda’s breath has barely cleared her lungs before she is on Hilda again, tongue tracing her jawline. When Hilda gasps, though, she pulls away, looks stricken.

“Did I—?”

“No,” Hilda replies. She pushes a red-blonde curl from her sister’s shoulder, brings Zelda back. “I’ll tell you if it’s too much. But for now…please don’t…don’t stop…”

Zelda nods, resumes her ministrations, kissing a line from just below her sister’s chin to the hollow of her throat, nipping there and then moving her feet, backing them both up until Hilda’s bottom connects with the breakfast table.

“Up,” she urges, bracing an arm around Hilda’s hips as the younger woman hoists herself. Hilda remembers a similar tableau, Cee’s kitchen table, cheap granite cold on her back. The struggle to keep up, to want, to feel. Dread coils in her belly, and she cannot begin to rationalize it away, not with Zelda’s tongue dragging across her throat, over her earlobe, and then the space just below and behind, a bit of Hilda’s anatomy Cee never managed to find. A volt of pleasure shoots straight down to her core.

“Do you like this?” Zelda asks, lips brushing the shell of Hilda’s ear. She is answered with a moan and a slurred, “Mmm…”

“Use your words, Hildegard,” drawls Zelda, tipping her sister’s chin up to gaze into her eyes. Beneath the teasing authoritarianism there is a thread of inquiry, and it helps Hilda, to know that she’s not alone in feeling not entirely sure.

“Yes,” Hilda replies, her breathing labored, heart going a mile a minute and thoughts kaleidoscopic—thrill, shame, lust, fear...

Zelda’s mouth is descending again, halts at Hilda’s palm pressed into her sternum.

“I like it, Zelds,” Hilda reassures when Zelda looks like she’s just been slapped, “But I think…I think we should stop. For today.”

“All right,” Zelda whispers. She pulls away, is then stranded in the middle of the kitchen, casting about for a distraction. The telephone is her saving grace. She hurries away to answer it, and Hilda, left behind and too deep in thought to budge from the tabletop, is still quivering, still ruminating, still desiring.


	10. Every time I see you all the rays of the sun are streaming through the waves in your hair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, finally updating this!

The return to their room is gradual. Hilda wakes to sobs from down the hall, and her first thoughts are of Sabrina. But that's an old, worn-out instinct, frayed at the ends like the girl's baby blankets. Batibat notwithstanding, her niece hasn't roused the household with her nightmares since she was tiny. And there's none of the bold need of a child's fear in these cries. These are intermittent, restrained, indicators of a deeper, darker dread.

The sound draws Hilda up, onto her feet and two doors down. Zelda pushes her away when she arrives, bids her go back to bed. Hilda does not obey as readily as she once did, does not relent. She tugs Zelda down to the mattress, and soon the older woman sleeps, curled up like a baby until morning.

They fall asleep most nights with walls between them, but then Zelda dreams, needs her sister. There comes a point where it is simply easier for them to be in the same room again. That is the excuse Hilda gives when Zelda comes in one evening to find her brushing out her curls at their old vanity. She merely shrugs, says "As you wish," pretends that she won't be trembling against Hilda in a matter of hours.

"Do you want to talk about them? The dreams, I mean," Hilda asks in the dark, her arm curling around her sister's waist.

"No." The refusal is meant to be final. Zelda endeavors to pull away. Hilda holds fast.

"Is it him?" she presses. She knows when Zelda's "no" means "please." The silence around them in leaden as Zelda crushes the bedsheets in her fist, gnaws her bottom lip.

"It hurt," she says at last, her voice like gravel through a sieve. She swallows, goes on: "Every time. I hated it, but it was no more than what I went looking for. I wanted..."

She wanted, she didn't want. She couldn't have, so she allowed, knowing that he was no fit stand-in for who she really needed. Knowing that he was damaging her, but that was the appeal, was it not? Zelda doesn't know how to explain it, shouldn't be so surprised when Hilda nods sagely.

"You're not to blame," she says. There's an unfamiliar hardness to her tone, and it scares Zelda. The fear makes her cling tighter.

"I let him. I frequently asked him."

"He shouldn't have done it," Hilda says, and it's not up for further debate. Zelda is forced to concede the point. She wonders if they--her and her sister--will ever be able to fix what he broke, feels contrition for making it Hilda's problem. Hilda holds her even closer, holds her like that for many nights afterwards until at last Zelda can sleep straight through.

They fall into a routine, something that even Zelda can feel secure in, dancing in the kitchen and kissing in hallways. They still fuck, sometimes. Well, Hilda fucks, and Zelda comes apart beneath her fingers and mouth, knits back together in her arms. Mostly, though, they go on as they always have, raising their niece and burying other people's dead, baking and canning and bickering. 

They sleep side by side and when Zelda wakes Hilda's snoring and her hair is scattered over the pillow and it's impossible to tell where golden locks end and the sunlight begins. At night there is Zelda by moonlight and galaxies born and dying in her eyes and Air Supply on the radio and everything has changed between them yet it's still just as it ever was.

Zelda wants and Hilda gives and it's still not enough. Nobody has ever accused Zelda Spellman of selflessness. She is not altruistic, she is not caring. She is not soft and it has never bothered her. 

Hilda in the morning, though. Hilda's curls and curves and her snores. The first few moments each day when her eyelids unfurl and she has no idea where or who she is, only that she is with Zelda, and that is enough. That, all of it and more, is what makes Zelda want to be generous. And if there's selfishness in the mix, too, a hunger for freckled flesh beneath her tongue, what does it matter? It all comes down to desire for Hilda.

Trouble is, she doesn't know how she can possibly articulate any of this. These soft, hazy feelings every time her sister enters a room, says her name, brushes past her in the kitchen...Zelda doesn't recognize them at first. This is not fast and frenetic, not careless and unrestrained. Not Zelda's usual formula of lust plus opportunity, with leather and steel added to taste. It's something else entirely and she feels it always, but it takes her some time to figure out _what_.

It comes to her one night in the middle of an orgasm, and she mulls it over as she comes down, cements it in her brain as she melts into Hilda's side. Zelda wants to say something, to confess it, but the words crackle in her throat. That's down to the orgasm, too, because Hilda kept her so on edge she could barely get a proper breath in.

Zelda lifts her head from where it's fallen to the pillow, calculates, thinks maybe she doesn't have to _tell_. But would Hilda allow her to show instead?

Sometimes they get so close. Sometimes Hilda's sighs are heavy, her groans filled with meaning when she kisses Zelda, hard enough to make it hurt while her thighs twine about Zelda's waist. And then some nights Hilda pecks her on the cheek once and rolls over and it's done. Her sister's behavior is just one more in the series of puzzle pieces Zelda has struggled to fit together her whole life.

She has never known what makes Hilda tick, at least not beyond the obvious: baking, sewing, mothering. It has always bothered her, Hilda's impenetrability, and killing her off to be free of that maddening conundrum won't work anymore. Hilda is as vulnerable as she ever was; she would go down easily beneath a hammer or a shovel or some belladonna in her tea. It is just that Zelda no longer has the heart for it.

She wants to _know_ Hilda. Zelda wants to feel what she feels like, to know how she sounds, tastes, what she looks like when pleasure takes her under, if she clings fast or pulls further away as it ebbs. It seems, occasionally, like Hilda wants it too, and then there are times she emphatically does not, and nights like tonight when Zelda cannot tell, cannot think of how to ask.

She is learning, though. Tonight, for instance, it is acceptable for her to stay close, to string small kisses along Hilda's neck. Her tongue dusts over first one freckle, then another, and then her mouth finds the witch's mark, nestled between Hilda's neck and sternum. There is one on Hilda's right hip, too. Zelda's barely seen her sister naked these past hundred years, but she and she alone bathed the younger witch from birth to age three. All Hilda's marks are graven upon her memory.

Hilda's sighs have begun etching themselves there, too, the rasp and catch of her breath as she whispers "Zelds..."

"Is this all right?" Zelda asks, lips hovering just above skin. It's a formality; she knows the way Hilda breathes when it is okay versus how she hardly does when it's not. But Hilda appreciates her asking, and Zelda is ashamed of how much that approval means to her.

"It's wonderful," replies Hilda.

"I'll stop when you want." Words painted onto flesh with Zelda's wandering mouth.

"Not yet."

 _Not yet_ when their lips meet. _Not yet_ when their tongues are rolling together around Hilda's sighs and gasps. _Not yet_ when Zelda's body covers her sister's and Hilda's hips cant up into her.

Not yet, only _more_ until Zelda has to hold onto a pillow to keep from tearing Hilda's nightgown away.

"I want to make love to you." It comes out breathier, more pleading than Zelda intended, and her stomach is hollow and quivering as she awaits Hilda's response.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, that's a cliffhanger. I'm sorry, but I'm still writing this. There was only going to be one more chapter but it was getting looooooooong so I separated it into two. I won't make you wait too long for the rest. I promise.


End file.
